The Fisher King Review

Booksellers, Libraries, NPOs

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Wed, 30 May 2012 20:42:00 PDT

Fisher King Press Opens Dedicated WHOLESALE Website.

Attention BOOKSELLERS, LIBRARIES, NPOs, and RETAIL INSTITUTIONS!

Our GENERAL PUBLIC online bookstore remains open. The retail public may continue to purchase Fisher King Press titles directly from the Fisher King Press Online Bookstore.

Our new WHOLESALE website Fisher King Books is dedicated to Booksellers, Libraries, Non-Profit Organizations, and Retail Institutions. Organizations who establish an account with Fisher King Books can purchase Fisher King titles with wholesale discounts.

Qualifying customers can register a new account at Fisher King Books. Then you'll be able to order Fisher King titles online at wholesale prices once your Bookseller, Library, NPO, or Retail Institution status has been confirmed. And remember - we ship worldwide.

Keep in mind that the Fisher King Press Online Bookstore remains open to the General Public and that Fisher King Books is a Wholesale store dedicated to Booksellers, Libraries, Non-Profit Organizations, and Retail Institutions.

Booksellers, Libraries, NPOs, and Retail Institutions - Click to register with the FKP Wholesale Bookstore.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

A Story of Toni Wolff & Emma Jung

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Sat, 26 May 2012 16:42:00 PDT

Jung Society of Atlanta Presents

Out of the Shadows, a play performed by Lucie Magnus and Nancy Qualls-Corbett

July 21, Saturday Lecture 7:30 pm
members: free; non-members $20; students $10

Please join us for a reading of Elizabeth Clark-Stern's story of the stormy, triangulated and ultimately transformative relationship between Emma Jung, wife of Carl Jung and Toni Wolff, his analyst, muse and mistress.

The play opens in 1910, as Sigmund Freud and his heir-apparent, Carl Jung, are changing the way people think about the mind and human nature. Emma, the twenty-six-year-old mother of four, aspires to heip her husband develop the science of psychology, but when twenty-two-year-old Toni Wolff enters the heart of this world as Jung's patient, her curious mind and devotion to Jung threaten Emma's aspirations. As Toni and Emma explore both their antagonism and common ground, they struggle to know the essence of the enemy, the "Other", as well as the power and depth of their own natures. The play follows Toni and Emma's rivalry over forty years while charting the parallel course of the field of psychology and some of its major players. —Press Release, C. G. Jung Society of New Orleans

Author, Elizabeth Clark-Stearn spent many years writing for theater, film, and television. She currently balances her artistic life with her beloved work as a psychotherapist. Out of the Shadows was performed in 2007 at the International Jungian Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2011, it played in Seattle and in New Orleans for the Archetypal Theater Company in collaboration with the Jung Society. In each performance, she returned to her first career as an actress, to play the role of Ton! Wolff. If you don't have the book, order a copy of Out of the Shadows, a play in two parts, from Fisher King Press. Also available is Elizabeth Clark-Stern's most recent publication - Soul Stories.

Lucie Magnus is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Birmingham. Lucie has performed numerous monologues, including Lucille from Clair de Lune and roles from Sand Mountain Matchmaking, both by Romulus Linney. She played Jung's Soul in Vault of the Heart by Connie Romero and Marilyn Marshall and based on the Red Book. She played Martha in the New Orleans production of Mary of Magdala by Armando N. Rosa. Lucie's affinity for theater blossomed in childhood as producer/director of her neighborhood Christmas pageants, where she played either Mary or the Angel.

Nancy Qualls-Corbett is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Birmingham. Nancy began acting in high school plays, including A Date with Judy, in which she played the role of Judy. Most notably, she played judge Hester Solomon in the Alabama Tri-Cities Little Theater production of Equus by Peter Shaffer.

LOCATION OF EVENT
Trinity Presbyterian Church 3003 Howell Mill Rd, NW, Atlanta, GA 30327
church's web page: www.trinityatlanta.org

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Concerning The Cycle of Life & The Eric Hoffer Award

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:06:00 PDT

Erel Shalit's The Cycle of Life has received honorable mention in the Culture Category of the 2012 Eric Hoffer Award

The following is an excerpt from the The Cycle of Life

The Grimm Brothers tell the story of how God decided about the duration of life, and the dire consequences of man’s demands:

When God created the world and was about to determine the duration of life for all the creatures, the donkey came and asked, “Lord, how long am I to live?”

“Thirty years,” replied God. “Does that content you?”

“Ah! Lord,” answered the ass, “that is a long time. Think of my painful existence! To carry heavy burdens from morning until night, to drag bags of corn to the mill so that others might eat bread, only to be cheered along and refreshed with nothing but kicks and blows! Spare me a portion of this long time.”

So God had mercy and gave him eighteen years. The donkey went away satisfied, and the dog made his appearance.

“How long would you want to live?” said God to him; “thirty years are too many for the donkey, but you will be satisfied with that long.”

“Lord,” answered the dog, “is that thy will? Just think how I shall have to run. My feet will never hold out so long. And what can I do but growl and run from one corner to another after I have lost my voice for barking and my teeth for biting?”

God saw that he was right, and settled for twelve years.

Then came the monkey. “You will certainly like to live thirty years,” said the Lord to him; “you need not work like the donkey and the dog, and will always enjoy yourself.”

“Ah! Lord,” he answered, “it may seem as if that were the case, but it is quite different. When it rains porridge, I have no spoon. I am always to play merry tricks and make faces for people to laugh, but when they give me an apple and I bite into it, why, it is sour! How often is sorrow hidden behind a joke. I shall never be able to hold out with all that for thirty years!”

God had mercy and gave him ten years.

At last man appeared, joyous, healthy, and vigorous, and begged God to determine the duration of his life.

“Thirty years you shall live,” spoke the Lord. “Is that enough for you?”

“What a short time!” cried man, “when I have built my house and my fire burns on my own hearth; when I have planted trees that blossom and bear fruit, and am just beginning to enjoy my life, then I am to die! Oh, Lord, lengthen my time.”

“I will add to it the ass’s eighteen years,” said God.

“That is not enough,” replied man.

“You shall also have the dog’s twelve years.”

“Still too little!”

“Well, then,” said God, “I will give you the monkey’s ten years as well, but you shall have no more.”

Man went away, but was not satisfied.

Thus man lives for seventy years. The first thirty are his human years, which are soon gone; that is when he is healthy and happy; works with pleasure, and is glad of his life. Then follow the donkey’s eighteen years, when one burden after another is laid on him; he carries the corn that feeds others, and kicks and blows are the reward of his faithful services. Then come the dog’s twelve years, when he lies in the corner growling, and has no longer any teeth with which to bite. And when this time is past, the monkey’s ten years bring man to the end. Now man is weak headed and foolish, does silly things and becomes the laughingstock for children. (1)

This grim(m) story tells a fundamental, though not absolute truth of life. It provides a healthy and bittersweet compensation for our common belief in and virtual worship of seemingly eternal, or at least life-long youth, with the concomitant repression of life’s darker sides and the denial of death. In fact, Ernest Becker claimed that man’s hope and belief is that the things created in society shall be “of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay.” That is, Becker considers the very basis of civilization to be a defense against human mortality. (2)

When cosmetics and plastic surgery mold a stiff and unyielding mask of youth, or rather of fictitious youthful appearance, old age cannot wear its true face of wisdom. By flattening out the valleys of our wrinkles, we erase the imprints of our character. Fixation in a narcissistic condition of an outworn mask silences the inner voice of meaning in our life.

Jung defines life as the “story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions to experience itself as a whole.”(3) The purpose of this book is to describe some of the principal archetypal images at play as we navigate our journey through the cycle of life. In each stage of life, there is an image, or rather a cluster of psychological themes that pertain to that particular period, such as the divine child and the orphan child.

Usually, these themes and images do not correspond to actual events or traumata, but reflect internal, archetypal experiences. The feelings related to being an orphan are universal, and a vital facet of growing out of certain states of childhood; sometimes, however, the archetypal image of the orphan may devastatingly strike a child by the traumatic loss of a parent. Traumatic experiences often cause fixation; the archetypal image becomes frozen in the psyche of the traumatized person, rather than serving as a transitory psychic constellation, eventually integrating into the fullness of the personality.

Furthermore, sometimes we are struck by the disparity between a predominant archetypal image and the prevailing developmental stage, as for instance like when we see a senex-child, that is, a child who seems to speak the old person’s tongue, rather than to be dwelling in the world of childhood play. Or, for example, a mother of four teenage children, all of whom thought of her as a ‘child-mother,’ immature and childish. Even when they were small, they felt that she wanted them to be parental children taking care of her.

The archetypal idea of a journey through life is outlined in Chapter I, in which Jung’s theory of the stages of life, as well as other perspectives, will be reviewed.

A focus on the river of life as an image of the journey will help illustrate the process of transformation from predetermined fate to individual destiny. Hermes, god of thieves and merchants, souls and roads, will guide us toward the Hermetic aspect of life’s journey, infusing the experience of life with meaning, when graced with those soulful gifts that alter life’s course.

The first actual stage we encounter on the journey is unavoidably The Child, whom we tenderly receive in chapter II. Archetypally, childhood is the idea and the image of the child rather than the concrete experience. The divine child, such as the child-god Eros, dwells in the vicinity of the gods, while ego-reality still seems far away, in a future that shall all too soon whirl up at the horizon. The ego germ dwells as but a prospective seed in the waters of the self. However, even at the archetypal level childhood is not pure splendor; behind existence in paradisiacal divinity lies the deep, dark and threatening abyss of chaos, of tohu-va-vohu, as it is called in the Bible.(4) Moreover, after reclining on the blissful couch of paradisiacal innocence, the necessary feelings of abandonment creep up upon us, as the fleeting moments of divine existence escape us, finding ourselves in the misery of life’s orphanage.

In this chapter, as in those that follow, dreams and tales will illustrate the archetypal images of life’s stages, considering as well the pathology of the cycle of life, and the meaning that abides in it.

The Puer and the Puella, the young man and the maiden, rush into the pages of the book in chapter III. They hold the fire and the spirit of the gods, trying like Prometheus to bring it to the use of man—man, sometimes being the threatened father who tries to wrestle the fire out of his son’s hand, extinguishing the flame and strangling the spirit, and sometimes in the image of the protective mother, carefully harnessing it by keeping the hearth’s fire burning.

As hero, the young person brings the fire of the self to the use and benefit of the ego, and exposes in the light of consciousness that which lingers in the dark. The task of the puer is to bring the Promethean fire and the spirit to combine with earth. However, the young ones are always in danger of tripping off into unfocused associations, or falling recklessly to the ground, onto the harsh earth, drunk by the wine, burned by passion or overtaken by the spirit.

In chapter IV, we shall stand on the firm ground of The Adult. The King in the fairytales is the ruler on earth, the dominant principle of collective consciousness, powerful in a man-made world. While ours is a world of limits and limitations, borders and boundaries, kings tend to get inflated with their hubris, disregarding the fact of their supposed appointment by divine decree. Kings often forget that they merely represent the unfolding of an archetypal image in the human realm. In the fairy tales of our psyche, the king is the ruler of ego and consciousness, of the self’s constellation in the ego, in the adult world of science, cities and organizations. The ego’s rule on earth may be a mirror image of the self, the terrestrial replication of the celestial city, and of nature’s order and organization, as we find it in a multitude of wonders, e.g. the bee-hive or the planets’ course in the universe. However, inflation is often the insignia of royal rule, whereby the spirit is lost, the earth dries up, and hunger and starvation transpire, since the softness and transparency of the soul are not nourished by material wealth. When inflation possesses power over the king, the feminine soul leaves his fairy tale, escaping like a grasshopper to avoid being squeezed between the pages, as the angry king slams shut the annals of his royal book. But alas the king himself dies—the ink of his pen has dried, the remainder of his page in history remains unwritten. When the waters of childhood are dry, and the fiery spirit of youth is obsolete, the collective consciousness of norms and rules often becomes repressive and oppressive.

In chapter V. i, we shall look for, and hopefully catch sight of the Senex, the old man or woman (5), who moves toward corporal invisibility, who leaves ego behind to melt into that greater Self, the world soul, that we can only intuit in the wind. He or she stands at the ultimate crossroads of corporal dis-integration and meaninglessness on the one hand, and a sense of humble participation in the unfolding of a greater scheme that relies on the way man shapes his consciousness and carries his destiny, on the other.

In chapter V. ii, we pay homage to Sophocles and his masterful play Oedipus at Colonus. We shall ponder upon the perhaps never fully resolved or resolvable conflict between meaninglessness, stagnation and disintegration versus a sense of purpose, meaning and transcendent connection.

We need to balance all these ages of individual development along the life cycle. The proportions change, however, and for instance a too earth-bound young person may set too severe limitations on his spirit, too soon. In the concluding chapter V. iii, we shall see how the puzzle may come together in a meaningful way, as the ego turns toward the Self.

As concerns psychology, we find that Freudian psychology is based primarily on the child archetype, as unfolding in childhood, in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that Freud himself was quite a neurotic adult. The Jungian approach is more of a senex-psychology, in the sense that central importance is placed on the quest for meaning. While Jung remained quite a playful child throughout his entire life, building towers and castles at the shores of the lake, he plunged into his introverted mind in search for meaning.

In so far as there is a nucleus of archetypal images at the center of each stage of life, the archetypal essence of each age is present in us all, throughout life, even if in various proportions and changing manifestations.

Jung spoke about the need for a modern myth based not only on ego-consciousness but individuation, which we may define as a vital, dynamic and meaningful relationship between ego and self (or Self)(6), an ever-changing relationship through life, which we shall explore as it unfolds through the seasons of our life. As Thomas Mann says, “Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”(7)

1 Grimm Brothers, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, pp. 716-718.
2 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 5.
3 Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 3.
4 The term ‘tohu-va-vohu’ can be understood as ‘waste and wild, wonder and bewilderment.’
5 While senex principally is the old, not necessarily wise man, it is here applied regardless of gender, just as senior, seniority and senility pertain to and affect men as well as women.
6 Jung did not capitalize the Self as archetype. It is, however, useful to capitalize the Self as archetype of wholeness and center, in distinction from the self as representation in the ego.
7 Thomas Mann, ‘Freud and the Future,’ Daedalus, p. 374.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting Edge Fiction, and a growing list of alternative titles.

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Revealing the Other Side - News Release

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Mon, 21 May 2012 21:52:00 PDT

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May 22, 2012

Just Published by Fisher King Press

Lifting the Veil
by Jane Kamerling and Fred Gustafson

The veil is not just a female garment to hide, protect, or humble Muslim women, but the curtain behind which resides the feminine principle, repressed in both East and West. Beneath the veil resides the unconsciousness of both cultures that become manifested in the politics of today.

The veil has emerged in the twenty-first century as an international symbol that holds a variety of meanings. The veil can be understood as merely the customary dress of Middle Eastern women, a religious expression, or a political statement. For some women donning the veil represents male dominance. For others the veil signifies self-determination and independence in reaction to the threat of Western ideology. The veil powerfully holds the polarity of attitudes and beliefs and invites the projections of psychological complexes in both Western and Islamic societies, fueling conflict between and within each culture.

To lift the veil of ignorance, it is necessary to understand both the Islamic and Western world views. Many Westerners know little about the history of the cultures, religions, and nations of the Islamic world. History classes in the U.S. are focused on American and European history and how Europe discovered, influenced, conflicted, and shaped American culture. Within that specific framework, everything the West knows about the world and its history tends to be viewed through a Western lens, influenced and molded within Christian ideology. All else is viewed as foreign and risks the possibility of being misunderstood since it seems different and is evaluated within our limited worldview.

From a historical and psychological perspective, Lifting the Veil explores and expands our knowledge of Islam, and the repressed feminine principle within both Eastern and Western cultures.

Jane Kamerling, L.C.S.W. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts and Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts. She is a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and has designed and co-directed the Clinical Training is a senior analyst who has lectured both nationally and internationality on the relationship of Jungian psychology to culture, mythology and religion. She has a full time analytical practice in Chicago.

Fred R. Gustafson, D. Min. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst (Zurich) and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts. He is a senior training analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and a clergy member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He has lectured both nationally and internationally on subjects related to Analytical Psychology and religion. He is the author of The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln: An Ancient Image for Our Present Time, Dancing Between Two Worlds; Jung and the Native American Soul and The Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine.

Buy Now

Lifting the Veil

First Edition

Paperback: 160 pages

Publisher: Fisher King Press (May 2012)

Language: English

ISBN-13: 978-1926715759

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

News Release - Riting Myth, Mythic Writing

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Mon, 21 May 2012 21:37:00 PDT

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May 22, 2012

Just Published by Fisher King Press

Riting Myth, Mythic Writing

Plotting Your Personal Story

By Dennis Patrick Slattery

Here's the foreword by Michael Conforti

Imagine sitting in an Irish pub, drinking ale and listening to the bard weave stories about so many different things, or perhaps captivated by the glow of an outdoor fire while listening to an elder telling stories about history, traditions, and ways to navigate the different life portals that each and every one of us will have to enter at some time. And then—there are stories about destiny, that illusive, mercurial something that catches hold of us at the beginning of life and never seems to want to let go. La forza di destino!! These are the experiences one has in knowing and working with Dr. Dennis Slattery. Whether sharing a pizza and beer or having the luxury of attending one of his lectures or classes, one is privileged to experience an authentic “elder” who, in the tradition of all those wise ones who came before him, has the gift of bringing the world of myth and imagination to life and showing us that indeed these are as real as anything we can touch and hold in our hands.

Dr. Slattery reminds us that myths teach us about all aspects of life, from birth to death, and through the weavings of these eternal stories not only help us recognize the presence of these universal and archetypal patterns but also shows us ways to approach the transcendent.

With more than thirty years of teaching and working with myth, Slattery’s newest work, entitled Riting Myth, Mythic Writing, is a bold adventure in that it asks the reader to actively engage in the mythic tradition, who is asked to take on the role of bard and allow the soul to tell its story. While he opens the book in reminding us of the perennial wisdom contained in myth, he extends this work by inviting the reader to speak with Self and soul and, in a mythopoetic way, engage psyche as experienced in one’s own symptoms, fears, hopes, and joys.

Unless one understands inherent profundity contained and revealed in myths and legends, it may be difficult to grasp the challenge inherent in Dr. Slattery’s latest work. He wants his readers not only to know these perennial stories but to assume a certain authorship in the mythic process. His hope is that through this process of “Mythic Writing,” the individual will cultivate a meaningful relationship with those transpersonal forces which guide the life process.

There are far too many workshops dealing with myth, legend, and personal writing experiences where individual narratives are somehow elevated to the domain of archetypal, mythic stories. Personal narratives are temporal, whereas myths are eternal and exist as the universal bedrock upon which each new experience is built. The “prima materia” of the soul’s experience may not easily accommodate personal narratives, which tend to override, dominate, and ignore those eternal processes that represent the gold of myths. In this journey between the personal and eternal, we sail between Scylla and Charybdis, a journey of two worlds. One is the world of the ego and the whims, needs, and illusions of an egoic world whose actions are often purely secular, despite its protest of caring for soul. Then there is the world of the transcendent. This is the domain Jung spoke of as Soul and Psyche and Rabbi Herschel calls the “Ineffable.” Once the realm of transcendence is touched, ego dominance and the supremacy of conscious intentions must, by necessity, take a back seat. Constructionism, narrative therapy, and the illusion that every piece of personal writing is a magnum opus of the soul must be humbled by all that is truly profound. We all know how important it is for parents to believe that whatever their child produces is sacred, and to some extent it is, even when it involves peanut butter, tomato sauce, sesame oil, and chocolate over noodles. But there comes a point when pasta and steak dinner and a really great bottle of wine really does sound and taste so much better than our child’s culinary creative expressions. For anyone who partakes of the joys of gastronomical wonders, a moment of reckoning and humbling will someday come when we have to say that my cooking just does not match up with what I know is truly delicious. After more than fifty years of working side by side with many of my own families’ cooks, learning the tradition of “La Cucina Povera,” there are still some foods I still can’t make as well as my aunts and grandfather have done for decades.

Slattery knows and fully appreciates great food and wines and knows where to find the pubs serving the finest brews in Ireland. He knows and loves tradition and has an eye for beauty, originality, and the dialect of Self. Now the question remains if he can inspire these same sensibilities in his students and readers.

His work is that of a bridge builder, a “mediatore,” one who connects, and in this book he points to a realm where the universal and eternal can be approached through the personal. In doing so, he shows us the relationship between those myths that have guided humanity since the beginning of time and those very tender and personal moments when we begin to write our own story, tell a tale, and hope to God that our story is a telling of something that still connects our life to the life of all those who came before us and that bridges the ego to the transcendent and archetypal. Writing from the ego can be—well, the story of the ego, while the work of myths is a telling of the eternal, the story of soul and a wisdom that far transcends conscious understanding. These are two very different approaches to myth and story.

It is in this work of making connections between ego and soul that Dennis Slattery is a master. From his many years of working with these eternal motifs, he can easily distinguish when the story is created for the benefit of aggrandizing the ego, from those moments where Self and pure inspiration eclipses the wishes of ego. Two different worlds, two different sensibilities, and each requires the deft hand of a master to sail through these waters, in which one wrong turn will land you against the rocky shore. On the other hand, we also experience those moments when sailor and sea are one, and at those times one has access to those vistas reserved for seekers of—of what?—of wisdom, of knowledge, of a way of life that far transcends the limitation of their personal ego?

So dear Dr. Slattery, navigate well with these sojourners. Teach them the ways of ancient mariners, of the shoals that have stranded sailors since the beginning of time and those stretches of open water that allow for endless journeys across the deep blue sea.

--Michael Conforti, Founder and Director of The Assisi Institute, Brattleboro, Vermont

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D. has been teaching and studying mythology as well as depth and archetypal psychology for the last 35 years. During that time, and in large measure through the writings of Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung, he has been creating and offering writing retreats throughout the U.S., at the Eranos Foundation in Ascona, Switzerland and the Assisi Institute summer program in Assisi, Italy. Riting Myth, Mythic Writing is a compilation and distillation of those experiences. These riting meditations can help guide and connect a person to a greater sense of the mythic as a way of knowing, and of story as a way of seeing and discerning the broad contours of one’s personal myth.

Buy Now

Riting Myth, Mythic Writing

by Dennis Patrick Slattery

Paperback

220 pages - Large 7.5 x 9.25 page format

First Edition

Publisher: Fisher King Press (June 1, 2012)

Language: English

ISBN: 9781926715773

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Archetypes of Romantic Love

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Sun, 20 May 2012 15:40:00 PDT

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Divine Madness: Archetypes of Romantic Love examines the transforming experience of romantic love in literature, myth, religion, and everyday life. John Ryan Haule holds a doctorate in religious studies from Temple University. He is a Jungian analyst trained in Zurich and is a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute-Boston.

“John R. Haule’s wonderful study of Romantic Love... is a first-rate psychological, literary and spiritual study... The author’s passion and courage in delving into his own experience... makes reading it a powerful experience in its own right.... One cannot help seeing oneself reflected in the magic mirror of Haule’s study and deriving light and succor therefrom. This is one of the rarest of books—one that really does speak to the heart as well as to the mind.” —Timothy O’Neill, Gnosis Magazine

“The author brings us wonderful stories from all over the world that point to the lover’s task: to see through to the soul of the beloved. Even our tangled relationships hide this task in their sufferings. Even the love of God brings us to this work. A moving and helpful book.” —Ann Belford Ulanov, Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion, Union Theological Seminary

“Haule has the clear eye of an analyst, the spirit of a theologian, and the heart of a troubadour. His lyrical prose invites the reader into the depths and breadth of romantic love by exploring its rich and varied imagery in literature and music. ...There are some little surprise jewels tucked in and under the main theme, such as some fresh definitions of classical Jungian concepts.” —Elizabeth S. Strahan, Past President of the C.G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles

The Inspiration of Opus House and Truchas Peaks

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:02:00 PDT

A number of Fisher King Press authors have spent time at Opus House and Truchas Peaks Place. Patricia Damery and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky wrote the preface, the section introductions, and flowed together the essays that comprised Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. Leah Shelleda, author of After the Jug Was Broken occasionally retreats to Opus House. Publisher Mel Mathews has completed a number of Fisher King Press titles while hiding away at this sacred place.

Truchas is nestled high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, with panoramic views of the Truchas Peaks, the Jemez Mountains, and the Pedernal, made famous by Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. At the midway point between Santa Fe and Taos, Truchas Peaks Place is easily accessible from either city, yet affords the peacefulness and pristine natural surroundings of a secluded retreat. Part of Spanish colonial village, Truchas, settled in 1754 is now a vibrant community of locals, artists, and craftspeople. Truchas is a place to re-calibrate. To escape stress, city noise, traffic, and everyday worries. To paint, read, walk, think, and spend time with loved ones.

Truchas Peaks Place houses the Donald Kalsched – Robin van Loben Sels 10,000-volume library and has more than enough space to allow group members to undertake individual work undisturbed, yet boasts excellent facilities for shared sessions.

Draft your next short story. Follow in the footsteps of the many great artists, past and contemporary, who have chosen North Central New Mexico as their base for its inspirational mix of peacefulness and majesty—Truchas is a favorite of poets and writers. Sit on the porch at sunset and watch the sun paint the mountains red. The landscape surrounding Truchas would inspire a painter at any skill level to new heights. Why not put together a painting workshop or retreat that includes the annual High Road Art Tour—or your own version of it? The rich culture and its creative output of sculpture, paintings, photography, pottery, weaving, jewelry, and crafts are sure to inspire you.

Explore the regional cuisine, hands-on style. Try your hand at cooking green chile stew with fresh produce from the farmer’s market. The gourmet kitchen at Truchas is the ideal setting for a food-lovers’ retreat, a fine cooking workshop, or simply a meal your family will never forget.

Listen to the yipping of the coyotes at dawn. The birds are not the only wild things greeting the stunning morning scenery of North Central New Mexico—though you will find plenty to delight over if bird-watching is a passion of yours. New Mexico boasts one of the richest lists of resident birds in the nation; around 500 all told. But songbirds share the region with many other animals, from muskrats and turtles to coyotes, deer, and bighorn sheep.

Stunning Natural Beauty, Luxury Accommodations, Meeting & Event Rooms, Wireless Internet . . . Truchas Peaks Place is a Northern New Mexico Retreat & Conference Center that is ideal for hosting a seminar, group retreat, small conference, family reunion? Are you looking for a unique venue to gather your family or a group of friends? Planning a workshop, an off-site company retreat, or a small wedding? Truchas Peaks Place is the perfect facility for small to mid-size groups, offering exquisite tranquility, luxury bedrooms, meeting rooms, an extensive library, a full-service kitchen for self-catering, and an abundance of possibilities for exploration.

Truchas Peaks Place, 1671 State Road 76, P.O. Box 471, Truchas, NM 87578

www.truchaspeaksplace.com — info@truchaspeaksplace.com

1-866-561-1671

Opus House
A place for Solitude and Creative Work

Opus House is a comfortable adobe home near the old Spanish village of Truchas in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Northern New Mexico. Sitting at 8300 feet elevation, 45 minutes from Santa Fe on the High Road to Taos, Opus House is offered to selected individuals of all callings and backgrounds as a place of solitude and creative work. It is seen as a place to be for a week or so to concentrate on a chosen creative process.

For those interested in exploring this offering, contact:
Opus House, 1671 State Road 76, P.O. Box 471, Truchas, NM 87578
www.opushouse.org — truchas@opushouse.org

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Tom Singer on Lifting the Veil

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:14:00 PDT

On Lifting the Veil

by Thomas Singer, MD

In her chapter “The Symbol of the Veil,” Jane Kamerling writes in this book of her seeing an Arab woman standing alone on top of a hill as night approached in the desert forty-five years ago: “Hidden under the robes that concealed her body was a world unknown to me.” This becomes the central, symbolic image of the authors’ quest of Lifting the Veil. Many meanings of this multivalent and potent symbol emerge in the journey to unveil to Westerners the foreign world of Arab Muslims. There is one potential, perhaps unintended, meaning of “Lifting the Veil” that occurred to me while reading this unique study. Could it be that the title of the book also boomerangs back onto the long veiled Jungian tradition of only looking at the world through our own very particular point of view—which is frequently quite blind and deaf to what is happening around us?

The point that I want to underline in this preface is that our own Jungian veil is being lifted in this book and others like it that are beginning to appear in our literature. This veil is our longstanding attitude toward the outer, collective world. Burned by his disastrous experience of speaking out on the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and his ill timed foray into discussing the still intriguing notion of national character, Jung and his followers for the next fifty years or so remained relatively quiet, perhaps even in retreat from, political, social, and cultural issues in favor of a primary, introverted focus on the individual and the individuation process. Most commentary about more collective matters used the theory of archetypes to explain what was happening in the psyche of the world. Over time, it has become rather tiring to me to see in our tradition how most collective events are reduced to or interpreted as some appearance of the Shadow or the Self or the Hero or the Feminine. The mention of archetypal patterns in collective life has begun to sound to me as if we can’t stop building our own theoretical Walmarts on the outskirts of increasingly homogenized urban and rural landscapes. As with globalization itself, the Jungian vocabulary for describing the world has become less and less meaningful as the particularity of place, landscape, history, economics, ethnicity, and every other distinguishing cultural characteristic gets ignored or glossed over in our universalizing, archetypal constructs.

This book reverses that trend by taking into account those levels of the psyche that Jung himself had outlined in a 1926 diagram of the psyche in which he displayed an almost geological/evolutionary vision of the psyche. At the very top of the diagram was the tiny ego, embedded in the family. In successive layers of the psyche as it plunged underwater, Jung indicated ever deepening realms in the following order: clans, nations, large groups (European man for example), primate ancestors, animal ancestors in general, and, at the very bottom of the human psyche lay the “central fire.”

The vast middle range of the psyche which included everything between clans and large groups that Jung himself diagrammed in 1926 was mostly ignored by those next generations of Jungians who followed in his footsteps. Their emphasis has been on the individual above and/or the archetypal realm in the lower depths which presumably emanate out of the “central fire.” I believe it is fair to say that the Jungians have mostly veiled themselves from taking into full consideration the reality and importance of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the psyche as it resides in individuals, clans, tribes, nations, and the world.

This book is not only making an effort to unveil the world of Arab Muslims to the Western world, it is participating in the unveiling of Jungians and the Jungian point of view to a much broader way of understanding the psyche of individuals and groups. It takes into account the vicissitudes of place, history, culture, and all those forces that shape the psyche of the collective and the individual.

If Jung was right that the human race hangs by the thin thread of the human psyche, exploring and understanding the cultural or social level of the psyche in all its complexities and differences is an essential undertaking in making that thread a little stronger. Our misadventures in the Middle East bare ample evidence to how costly it can be when we fail to understand how different Americans and other westerners are from much of the world. This book takes a big step in the direction of exploring and understanding these essential levels of the human psyche and I salute Jane Kamerling and Fred Gustafson for their effort at “lifting the veil.”

Lifting the Veil will begin shipping on May 15, 2012

Advanced Orders Welcomed

Thomas Singer, M.D. is a Jungian Diplomate Analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, California. He currently serves as Editor of the Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Culture Series for Spring Journal Books and his new contributions in that series appear in Psyche and the City: A Soul's Guide to the Modern Metropolis, Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche and Placing Psyche: Exploring Cultural Complexes in Australia.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Civilization in Transition - Facing Change with Consciousness

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:39:00 PDT

'Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.'

--C.G. Jung

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION II

FACING CHANGE WITH CONSCIOUSNESS

Today’s sweeping changes can no longer be ignored: changes in communications and travel, in technology, population, immigration, economic and political upheavals and religious ideas and ideals... Even the climate seems to reflect this transitional time that Carl Jung foresaw decades ago, calling it a coming “spiritual transformation.”

Jung believed we face what the Greeks called “kairos,” a time of metamorphosis of the gods, a fundamental change in principles and symbols. He noted that human relationship has not kept pace with scientific, technical, and social progress, leaving humanity morally backward and out of balance with its own time. Some kind of rebalancing is inevitable, but the direction it takes and the dangers involved are far from certain. (From CW X, para 378-585)

Jung was cautious about the future, but not entirely pessimistic. He reminded us that not all things are in the hands of the Fates alone, as paraphrased below:

Those with insight into their own actions and access to the unconscious involuntarily influence their environment, not by persuading or teaching, but through an effect that pre-industrial peoples call "mana," an influence on the unconscious of others... (CW X, para 583)

Last November a group met to explore massive current changes and the role of individual consciousness in influencing our future’s direction. Thoughtful speakers, reflective conversations, music, and the sacred mineral waters of Ojo Caliente combined for an extraordinary three days. The Foundation for International Jungian Studies will sponsor the conference again, Sunday Nov. 4 – Wednesday Nov. 7, 2013. Speakers and format are changed, but the theme remains the same, and we will again keep the group small to allow for open, free discussion. This year John Hill of Zurich will join us to lead psychodrama as we try to develop greater consciousness of who we have been individually and collectively, who we are now, and the relational morality we must develop if we are to effect positive change for Earth and its inhabitants.

We invite you to join us for this vital discussion. Last year we were unable take all those who wanted to attend. If you are seriously interested, we urge early registration. Let us know if you applied too late for acceptance last year, and we’ll try to see that you get in this time.

The Foundation for International Jungian Training is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the support of concentrated studies in Analytical Psychology. Directors: John Desteian, Murray Stein, Stefan Boethius, Nancy Qualls, Wynette Barton, Judith Harris, Paul Brutsche, Penelope Yungblut and Dariane Pictet.

This Year's Program

Civilization in Transition II

Creative Consciousness in a Changing World

Ojo Caliente, New Mexico November 4 – 7, 2012

We begin Sunday afternoon at 4:00 with a traditional Indian blessing by a member of the Santa Clara Tribe. After an opening program we will have small group discussions over dinner. Meals are provided and served at tables of 4 to 8 people. Group discussions will often take place over meals, so plan for these wholesome, delicious meals as part of the experience.

Author and photographer Michael Benanav will bring slides and experiences of cultures very different from our own. Their way of life now threatened, some face new, unknown ways of living, or extinction. Michael regularly travels remote areas, once crossing the Sahara to Timbuktu with a camel caravan. Author of Men of Salt, he shoots for The New York Times, Lonely Planet, Afar, and other publications. … We are pleased to have with us well known and beloved Zurich Analyst John Hill, whose address will be “At Home in the World? Bridge Building in Unsettled Times.” John will also help us explore dreams, memories, images, ideas through Psychodrama, one of his areas of expertise. … Nancy Qualls-Corbett, Birmingham Analyst and author of The Sacred Prostitute, among other books, will be with us again this year, this time to discuss the rising interest in Mary Magdalene and what this feminine figure means in collective consciousness. … Jacqueline Hairston will show us how a society’s music mirrors its mood and time in history. Trained at Julliard and graduate of Howard, Jacqui has composed and arranged music for Kathleen Battle, Robert Sims, Sweet Honey & the Rock, and last month conducted her own ensemble at Carnegie Hall. … Austin Analyst Wynette Barton will act as conference coordinator.

Time: Sunday, Nov. 4, beginning 4 PM, through Wed, Nov 7, ending at 12 noon.

Location: Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, known for centuries to American Indians for its healing mineral waters, is a two-hour scenic drive from Albuquerque. (Travel details will be sent to registrants.) Weather: Usually sunny, brisk. Average Temp 45-65 degrees F. in November. Continuing Education: 8 hours credit from Texas LPC Board. Check to see if reciprocal for your license. Reservations should arrive by May 15, 2012 for the special rate. Later registrations accepted if space is available. A non-registering guest may stay in your room for $10 (total) and/or may take meals with the group for $270. Discounted room rates are available for those wishing to stay on a few days after the conference.

DOWNLOAD REGISTRATION FORM

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Marked by Fire and the Gathering of Souls

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:12:00 PDT

Contributors Present: Chie Lee, Sharon Heath, Jacqueline Gerson, Naomi Lowinsky,
Karlyn Ward, Patricia Damery, Dennis Patrick Slattery, Jean Kirsch,
Robert Romanyshyn, Claire Douglas, Gilda Frantz, at Saturday evening dinner.

Several of the Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way authors traveled to Los Angeles on April 14 & 15 for the official book launch hosted by the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. The Saturday evening before the launch, one of the contributors, Chie Lee, President of the Los Angeles Institute, hosted a dinner for the authors and their spouses. Eleven of the thirteen contributors were able to be present.

Henry Abramovitch on Skype
from Jerusalem.

Jerome Bernstein via
Skype from Sante Fe.

Sunday's book launch was a full house at Temple Isaiah across the street from the Los Angeles C.G. Jung Institute. Christophe Le Mouel, Executive Director of the LA Institute, arranged Skype so that Jerome Bernstein from Santa Fe and Henry Abromovitch from Jerusalem could also join the celebration.

Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, and a growing list of alternative titles. www.fisherkingpress.com

News Release: The History of My Body

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:40:00 PDT

2011 Book of the Year Award Finalists Announced

The History of My Body is a finalist for the 2011 Book of the Year Awards in the literary fiction category.

ForeWord Reviews is pleased to announce the 2011 Book of the Year Awards list of finalists. Representing more than 700 publishers, the finalists were selected from 1200 entries in 60 genre categories. These books are examples of independent publishing at its finest.

A twist on the traditional coming-of-age novel, Sharon Heath's The History of My Body is the story of Fleur Robins, daughter of an alcoholic mother and an anti-abortion crusading father, whose preoccupation with God and the void ends up thrusting her into the center of a culture war over the reach and limits of the human imagination.

Sharon Heath is a Jungian Analyst who writes fiction and non-fiction exploring the interplay of science and spirit, politics and pop culture, contemplation and community. The History of My Body is published by Genoa House, an imprint of Fisher King Press.

ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Awards program was established to help publishers shine an additional spotlight on their best titles and bring increased attention to librarians and booksellers of the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors. Award winners are chosen by librarians and booksellers who are on the front lines, working everyday with patrons and customers.

ForeWord is the only review trade journal devoted exclusively to books from independent houses.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Merritt on "The Hunger Games," Politics, and the Environment

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:53:00 PDT

by Dennis L. Merritt, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Ecopsychologist

The movie The Hunger Games at one level depicts the adolescent's world on steroids and at another level relates to powerful forces stirring in America. As a nation we are struggling to find a new identity as the myths that have sustained us are showing their age and ineptness while the controlling powers are expressing themselves more strongly. In Games those controlling forces directed by President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland, are challenged by a powerful feminine energy in the form of sixteen year old Katniss Everdeen, played by Jenifer Lawrence.

The Story from an Archetypal Perspective

In the film the rule of the archetype of the Old King as embodied by the President is nearing its end. The King represents the dominant features of a culture depicted in its values, attitudes, behaviors and systems. (1) Old systems in Snow's realm are showing signs of strain in a decadent society that has lost its soul. The ruling power uses intimidation, deceit and diversions to maintain its position. The Capitol is the powerhouse and center of President's domain, a place of ultra modernity in its buildings, machines, and electronic marvels. It is inhabited by a ruling elite of shallow people living in luxury who are caricatures of humans with their bizarre clothing, makeup and behaviors. This society without a heart is epitomized by an annual event—the Hunger Games—captivating the entire culture. The games cruel nature is symptomatic of the absence of the Queen archetype—there is no feminine companion/counterpart to the President. The Queen symbolizes the Eros or archetypal feminine in a culture, the feeling values and how people relate to each other. In the film a primary feminine figure is the woman who reaps the tributes from the districts: a shallow, empty, painted woman enamored with the allure of the games.

Outside the Capitol lie twelve poor, starving, downtrodden districts still being punished for a rebellion over 74 years ago. Twelve is an archetypal number associated with wholeness (twelve months, twelve apostles). Here we have a kingdom of the haves and the have nots, reflecting the 1% and 99% in American society. Every year a male and a female between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected at random as tribute (sacrifice) to represent their district in the Hunger Games. The randomness highlights the cruel uncertainty of fate, subjecting everyone to its fears. The games are an annual reminder of the punishment for rebelling against the powers that be, a punishment meted out in the form of human lives for the entertainment of the populace and a means of maintaining a fear in both city and country of the ruling power.

The tributes get trained in the arts of combat and survival before being thrown into a dog-eat-dog world—the ultimate survival show—teenage gladiators in a Thunderdome sport. To survive they must generate interest in sponsors, selling themselves to their captors' conscious and unconscious desires. Game activities are manipulated for audience appeal and the rules changed accordingly, including a manufactured love scene. READ MORE

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

News Release - Sundered

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:20:00 PDT

April 17, 2012

Just Published

Sundered

poems by Phyllis Stowell

“This is not what is true, merely true.” Images of intrusion, aggression, martyrdom, achievement, pilgrimage move in and out of these poems as they move in and out of our dreams, their relation to the lived life real but imponderable. Phyllis Stowell’s writing seems to acquire a new clarity and strength of purpose, paradoxically, as it plunges into the mysterious. For me this stands with Arc of Grief at the top of her work.

—Alan Williamson

Phyllis Stowell is Professor Emerita and Founding Member of Saint Mary’s College of California MFA. Her poems have appeared in over forty traditional and avant-garde reviews. In addition to Sundered, she is the author of several other poetry collections. She is co-editor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor: An Anthology of Women Poets. Phyllis lives in Berkeley, California.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

News Release - Solar Light, Lunar Light

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:14:00 PDT

April 17, 2012

Just Published

Solar Light, Lunar Light
by Howard Teich

“The perception that masculine and feminine traits represent oppositional forces has contributed to a long history of personal and cultural dysfunctions. Through a skillful interweaving of modern psychology, mythology and ancient history, Howard Teich, PhD offers a thought provoking thesis that these polarizing traits are actually cooperative partners in evolution’s dynamic dance. Solar Light, Lunar Light is a healing journey that encourages readers to transcend misperceived limitations so that we may write a new empowering chapter in human evolution.”

–Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., Cell biologist and bestselling author of The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles and coauthor with Steve Bhaerman of Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (And A Way To Get There From Here)

“This is a significant, life changing book. Howard Teich’s work is crucial to understanding and healing the damage our rigid ideas of gender have done to us all, women and men alike. This is a book that can change how you see every problem you encounter and point you toward deeper more creative responses. Here is a psychology that has the potential of restoring us all and our world to wholeness.”

–Susan Griffin, author of A Chorus of Stones and Woman and Nature

"Howard Teich has discovered a brilliantly simple and invaluable way of helping men and women move towards wholeness and healing. With vivid examples from his therapeutic practice and from his own life, Solar Light, Lunar Light presents Teich's pioneering development of the solar/lunar polarity, and his sharp distinction of this from the masculine/feminine polarity with which it has long been uncritically and often destructively conflated. Recognizing this distinction, and moving towards a deep integration and rebalancing of the solar and lunar principles, represents a crucial task not only for every individual but for our civilization."

–Richard Tarnas, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies, Author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

“Howard Teich has created a skillful and sensitive therapy based on the solar and lunar archetypes. His work is a fascinating enrichment of Jungian psychology that combines modern scientific theory with his own personal experience of emotional crisis. Solar Light, Lunar Light is a significant contribution to contemporary psychotherapy.”

–Theodore Roszak, Professor emeritus of history at California State University, Haward. Author of The Making of a Counter Culture and The Voice of the Earth

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

News Release - Marked By Fire

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:54:00 PDT

April 16, 2012

Fisher King Press announces the publication of

Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

"This life is the way, the long sought after way to the unfathomable which we call divine" —C.G. Jung, The Red Book

When Soul appeared to C.G. Jung and demanded he change his life, he opened himself to the powerful forces of the unconscious. He recorded his inner journey, his conversations with figures that appeared to him in vision and in dream in The Red Book. Although it would be years before The Red Book was published, much of what we now know as Jungian psychology began in those pages, when Jung allowed the irrational to assault him. That was a century ago.

How do those of us who dedicate ourselves to Jung’s psychology as analysts, teachers, writers respond to Soul’s demands in our own lives? If we believe, with Jung, in “the reality of the psyche,” how does that shape us? The articles in Marked By Fire portray direct experiences of the unconscious; they tell life stories about the fiery process of becoming ourselves.

Authors of Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

Henry Abramovitch, Ph.D., is training analyst and founding President of Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology. He has served on Ethics and Program Committees of the IAAP and provides supervision to Developing Group in Poland. He is Professor at Tel Aviv University Medical School and served as President of Israel Anthropological Association and as co-facilitator of Interfaith Encounter Group. He is author of The First Father (2nd edition, 2010) and forthcoming volume on brothers and sisters. His special joys are poetry, dream groups, and the holy city of Jerusalem, where he lives with wife and family.

Jerome S. Bernstein, M.A.P.C., NCPsyA., is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a senior analyst on the teaching faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe of which he is a former President. He was the founding President of the Jungian Analysts of Washington (D.C.). He is the author of Power and Politics, the Psychology of Soviet-American Partnership (Shambhala 1989), Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma (Routledge 2005) and is co-Editor, along with Philip Deloria, of the groundbreaking book, C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Spring Books: 2009), in addition to numerous articles concerning international conflict, shadow dynamics in the collective psyche as well as various clinical topics and lectures internationally on these and other subjects.

Patricia Damery, M.A., is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in private practice in Napa, California, where she and her husband farm a Biodynamic organic ranch. She has published numerous articles, as well as a book detailing her analytic training and simultaneous entry into Biodynamic farming: Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation. Her novel, Snakes, the story about the demise of the family farm and the impact on one family, told through the mythology of the snake, was published by Fisher King Press in March 2011. Her forth coming novel Goatsong, a story of the resilience of love, is to be published 2012.

Claire Douglas, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst. She trained at the New York Association for Analytical Psychology and has been a training and supervisory analyst with the C. G. Jung Institute of LA since 1992. She lectures and writes books and articles on Jung and on women’s psychology. Her latest, The Old Woman’s Daughter, was the fourteenth of the Fay Lecture Series. She is deeply grateful to live and still practice in a house on a bluff looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

Gilda Frantz, M.A., is an analyst practicing in Santa Monica, California. She is co-editor in chief of Psychological Perspectives, a Jungian Journal of World Thought, and is a Director of the Philemon Foundation, Emerita. She served on the Board for five years, during the planning and publication of The Red Book. Gilda lives with her mixed poodle/terrier, Spike, whom she found at an animal shelter.

Jacqueline Gerson, J.A., is a Jungian analyst with a private practice in Mexico City, where she works as an analyst, teacher and supervisor. With a life long passion for dance and movement she first approached dreams as spontaneous choreographies created by the psyche. That discovery led to her to the study of analytical psychology eventually to become an individual member of the IAAP . She lectures on topics related to analytical psychology throughout the world and has been published in The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, with Daimon Verlag, Brunner-Routledge, Spring Journal, as well as the Mexican Magazine Epoca.

Sharon Heath, M.A., is a certified Jungian Analyst in private practice and a faculty member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. She writes fiction and non-fiction exploring the interplay of science and spirit, politics and pop culture, contemplation and community. She has given talks in the United States and Canada on topics ranging from the place of soul in social media to gossip, envy, secrecy, and belonging. She served as Associate Editor of Psychological Perspectives and Guest Editor of the special issue The Child Within/The Child Without. Her novel The History of My Body was published by Genoa House in 2011.

Jean Kirsch, M.D., is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst practicing in Palo Alto, California. She is married to the Jungian analyst Tom Kirsch, the son of Hilde and James Kirsch, who were instrumental in founding the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. She is past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where she continues teaching as a member of the faculty. Her current interests include grandmothering, writing, and teaching Analytical Psychology, both in San Francisco and for the several developing Jungian groups in Taiwan and mainland China.

Chie Lee, M.A., is a Jungian analyst with a private practice in Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles. She received a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology in 1990 from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She was trained at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and received her diploma in 2000. Chie has been an active member of the Los Angeles Jungian community. She teaches and supervises in the Institute Training program and serves on the Board and many Committees. She has given seminars on Chinese fairy tale, movie and Avant-Garde art. Chie served as the President of the L.A. Institute from 2010-2012.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ph.D., is an analyst member of the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute, and a widely published poet. Her recent memoir, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way tells stories of her pushy muse. She is also the author of The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find her Female Roots and three books of poetry. The most recent is Adagio & Lamentation. Lowinsky has written many essays in what she considers her “Jungian memoir” mode, They have been published in Psychological Perspectives and in the Jung Journal. She teaches and lectures in many settings. She is the winner of the Obama Millennium Award for a poem about Obama’s grandmother.

Robert D. Romanyshyn, Ph.D., is a Senior Core Faculty Member of the Clinical Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute and an Affiliate Member of The Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. Author of six books, numerous chapters in edited volumes and journal articles, he is currently working on a series of small books that explores outside the boundaries of academia various ways of saying soul. Two works in this series are his recently completed DVD, Antarctica: Inner Journey in the Outer World, which explores the chiasm among images, music and words, and a book of poems, Leaning Toward the Poet.

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D., is Core Faculty in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is the author , co-author, editor or co-editor of 17 books, including four volumes of poetry. The author of dozens of articles in journals, magazines and newspapers, Dr. Slattery continues to work in the cross-currents of poetry, myth and depth psychology. He offers Riting Retreats on one’s personal myth across the United States and in Europe. His new book, Day-to-Day Dante: Exploring One’s Personal Myth Through The Divine Comedy, is available on his website. He is finishing a new book, Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story.

Karlyn M. Ward, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., is an analyst member of The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and is in private practice in Mill Valley, California. She writes and teaches on the relationship of music to the psyche, works with music as an entré to active imagination, and is a Fellow in the Association of Music and Imagery. Her DVD, Anchored in the Heart: Redeeming the Dark Feminine explores the implications of the figure of Mary of Magdala in word, art, and music. Her book Visitation in a Zen Garden almost wrote itself after a family of grey foxes (parents and four kits) took up residence in the backyard zen garden designed by her husband, Richard Ward. She is continuing to write about her archetypal experiences.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Eros and Depth Psychology Alliance Online Book Club

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:41:00 PDT

Ken Kimmel will be tending the free Depth Psychology Alliance online book club which will be featuring Eros and the Shattering Gaze: Transcending Narcissism during the month of April 2012.

Each month, the group is "tended" by a different author who takes charge of the group on the first day of the designated month to introduce the book, assign selected readings, and pose study questions, so Ken will be on call to monitor progress, field questions online, point out themes, comment on select passages, draw out correlations with current events, and he will be available for questions, comments and discussions.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Art & Psyche Conference

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:31:00 PDT

Fisher King author Mark Winborn, PhD, will be presenting lectures based on his 2011 book Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey at the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts spring meeting which takes place April 18-21, 2012 in Boulder, CO and at this summer's Art and Psyche Conference in NYC, July 19-22.

During August 2012 he will also be the featured author for the month on the Depth Psychology Alliance website.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

The Annunciation and the Original Face

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:06:00 PST

The Annunciation and the Original Face
A Depth Psychological Approach

On March 23-24, 2012 the Charlotte Friends of Jung will be hosting Fisher King Press Author Mariann Burke.

Jung wrote that if he were to choose a religious image to describe the Individuation process, he would choose the Annunciation. While generally in Christianity the Annunciation has been presented as historical, we will consider its message as happening now. In Jung’s view, such images open the way to what lies beyond them and to the wellsprings of soul.

Friday Evening Presentation: Artists introduce us to deeper aspects of ourselves by inviting us into the world of image. Mariann Burke will frame her lecture by a series of Marian images, expressions of the Sacred Feminine, by Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesco, Poussin, and others. She will explore symbolical meanings in the Annunciation image: the Dove, Mary, Angel, Virgin Birth, to name a few. Moving toward Franck's "Original Face" icon of Mary, she will reflect on the "creative spark" or "pointe vierge," understood both in Christian thought and depth psychology as the "place" or experience in psyche where human and divine meet.

Saturday Workshop: This workshop will offer time to explore further personal responses to the images already shown, as well as another Annunciation by a 20th century artist. Participants will write and/or share their feelings, ideas, and insights as we reflect on the role of the Sacred Feminine in its various manifestations... Mary as one archetypal image... in today's world.

Mariann Burke, RSCJ, is a Jungian analyst living in Newton, MA. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, Andover- Newton Theological School, and the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Her publications include Mary as Archetype, Advent and Psychic Birth (1993) and more recently, Re-Imagining Mary: A Journey through Art to the Feminine Self (2009). She is on the faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute, Boston.

March 23-24, 2012

Time/Place: Friday Evening: 7:30 pm.

Saturday Morning: 9 am – 1 pm

Movement Dialogues Studio, 4805 Park Rd., Suite 200,

at the corner of Seneca and Park Road.

Cost: Friday evening - $20 members; $25 nonmembers.

Saturday workshop - $40 members; $45 nonmembers.

Learn more at: www.charlottejung.org

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Lover and More: the Toni Wolff Story

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:55:00 PST

a lecture by Lucy Sikes
hosted by the C.G. Jung Society of Colorado

What does Toni Wolff have in common with Madam Curie? With Georgia O’Keeffe? During an informative evening, participants will learn recently published secrets about the life of early Jungian analyst, Toni Wolff. Are these actually secrets? When the book Four Eternal Women: Toni Wolff Revisited—A Study in Opposites (Mary Dian Molton and Lucy Anne Sikes) went to press in early 2011, no authoritative biography of Toni Wolff had been published. There were some chapters on her in other books, but they did not have the breadth or depth of research that Molton and Sikes have accomplished.

For too long, Toni Wolff’s contributions were kept in shadow. The open secret of her relationship with C.G. Jung was generally known but not discussed at the first Jung Institute. This lecture will present Toni Wolff’s story. At the same time her unique contribution of Feminine Typology, as well as her contributions to Jung’s typology, will be presented in vivid stories.

Lucy Anne Sikes, MS, ARNP, is a senior Diplomate Jungian Analyst. After attending the University of Arizona, Tucson, she moved to Denver to pursue her profession as a Psychiatric Nurse Specialist. During this time, she entered analytic training with the Denver group of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysis. She is currently in private practice in Prairie Village, Kansas. Her first book, co-authored with Mary Dian Molton, is Four Eternal Women: Toni Wolff Revisited-A Study in Opposites.

Date & Time: March 30th, 2012 at 7 p.m.
Location: First Divine Science Church, 14th Ave. and Williams St. Denver, CO, 80292
Cost: free to members, $15 at the door, $10 students and seniors

For more information contact:
C.G. Jung Society of Colorado
1776 S. Jackson #203,
Denver, CO 80210
303-575-1055
email: info@jungsocietyofcolorado.org

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

A Dangerous Method and Ecopsychology

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:33:00 PST

A Dangerous Method Seen From A Jungian Ecopsychological Perspective, Even

by Dennis L. Merritt, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Ecopsychologist

The film A Dangerous Method is remarkable in its presentation of the early days of the psychoanalytic movement that was to revolutionize our understanding of the human psyche. Superb acting dramatizes the relationship between two giants of the psychoanalytic world, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the struggle between them that led to a painful split still reverberating through their two schools of thought over 100 years later. Sabina Spielrein, a former Jewish patient with whom Jung was to have an intimate relationship, functions in the archetypal feminine role of Eve in painfully forcing the raising of male consciousness through the discovery of countertransference. She became the seed of Jung's concept of the archetype of the soul, the anima or inner feminine in a man. Other significant elements in the film include the powerful role of sex in life and in the therapeutic environment, the the midlife crisis, the association experiment, and the issue the “Jewish” and the “Christian” cultural unconscious. As a Jungian analyst and ecopsychologist, I see in Sabina Spielrein as portrayed in A Dangerous Method as the catalyst that eventually led Jung to believe that a strong emergence of archetypal feminine energy in Western culture is the most important element in a needed paradigm shift. He called the shift a “New Age” and the “Age of Aquarius,” a shift with important ecological implications.

Why the Method was Dangerous

The beginning of psychoanalysis was particularly dangerous because it blew the lid off a culture trapped in a repressive Victorian worldview. Following Freud's initial exploration of the unconscious using cocaine and hypnosis, he developed a revolutionary approach called “the talking cure” which encouraged patients to tell their thoughts and fantasies to an analyst. What is repressed ultimately turns against us in a negative form, and what Freud discovered was the results of centuries of repression in our Judeo-Christian culture of powerful instinctual drives, especially sexuality. The material was so shocking Freud called it “the seething caldron of the Id,” full of animalistic drives, barbaric behavior, and childish immaturity, as he saw it.

While Freud was analyzing privately and primarily with sexually repressed and abused Viennese women, Jung, 19 years Freud's junior, began working in the world-renowned Burgholzli clinic in Zurich in 1900, the year Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams based on approximately 13 years of developing his methods and concepts. Eugene Bleuler, the chief at Burgholzli, insisted doctors live on the grounds of the cantonal mental institution, as depicted in Method, eat with the patients, and speak in their dialect. (Ellenberger 1970, p. 666, 667) Because of Jung's background, described in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he was particularly good at relating to schizophrenics and published an important paper on the topic. This, together with his development of the association experiment, convinced Jung their was an unconscious and led to his meeting with Freud.

The Association Experiment

The conduct of the association experiment is depicted in the movie where Jung tests his wife as Sabina Spielrein helps gather the data. When I trained in Zurich we had to participate in, then administer and write up an association experiment, be graded on a paper, and pass an oral exam on the subject (I graduated in 1983). Memory was a topic of psychological interest in the late 1800s, and Jung and others conducted research on what interfered with the conscious intent to free associate to 100 words read to the client with the simple instruction to respond as quickly as possible to each word. The word list was designed to have what was thought to be psychologically loaded words like father, mother, death, etc. with more neutral words like long, ship, etc. The researcher uses a stop watch to time the responses. Most responses are immediate but Jung discovered over 100 indicators that something impedes free associations, one of the strongest indicators being prolonged response time (as depicted in the movie), with other indicators being rhyming responses, foreign words, etc., proving that unknown factors can affect conscious intent, what Jung called the unconscious. (Collected Works, volume 2) Analyzing the results and questioning the client about difficulties in answering revealed the source of the problem, what Jung called complexes (“hangup). Further development of Jung's work became the lie detector test.

The Discovery of Countertransference

To delve into the muck of the Western cultural unconscious was particularly dangerous during the trial-and-error days of the early psychoanalytic movement in the relationship between a male analyst and a female client. This became a central theme in the movie. Sabin Spielrein had a strong transference (patient-to-the analyst eros/feeling of a strong connection) onto Jung, at Jung's encouragement. Having worked with women longer than Jung, Freud had more experience with this phenomenon, and his genius and self-reflection enabled him to identify strong erotic feelings he often had towards his female clients. His initial idea was that the analyst could be completely objective, which was one of the reasons the analyst sat behind the client so everything the client said was thought to be their fantasies and feelings against an objective background supposably offered by the analyst. Jung's entanglement with Spielrein helped Freud more easily reflect on his own analyst's experiences and develop the concept of countertransference—the projections of the analyst's unconscious material onto the client. In other words, the analyst could not be completely objective, making it necessary for the analyst to become aware of what was being stirred up in himself or herself as the patient presented their innermost thoughts, fantasies and emotions. Jung became the first analyst to require students training to become analysts to undergo a training analysis: experiencing their own unconscious and what its like to be in analysis, and being supervised to learn not only how to apply theoretical concepts but also to explore their unconscious connections to the patient. A minor error in the movie from a psychoanalytic standpoint is Jung using the term countertransference fairly early when he was trying to understand what was happing between himself and Spielrein.

The Midlife Crisis

Jung experienced with Spielrein what he would come to describe as the early stages of a midlife crisis. In 1906 after Spielrein had left the hospital and Jung began to get emotionally involved with her he was 31 years old. He became more erotically and sensually involved with her in 1908 and 1909. Jung had worked hard to get through medical school, graduated in 1900 at age 25, and used his boundless energy and drive to read all the psychiatric literature to date. He was married in 1903 to the second wealthiest Swiss heiress and had the responsibilities of fatherhood with the birth of his first child in 1904 and a second child in 1906. His poor background haunted him, he was painfully aware of growing up with parents in a difficult marriage, and his hysterical mother had been severely depressed, especially in Jung's early childhood. This was a mother who frightened him with her fervent belief in ghosts and spirits. As the daughter of a Swiss Reformed (strict late 19^th century Protestant) minister she and her sibs had to sit behind her father as he wrote his sermons and swat away the demons. Jung's father was also a Swiss Reformed minister in a poor rural area, and both parents were from long lines of ministers. Jung would eventually describe a minister's children complex created by preaching a standard of perfection and parishioners watching the family closely, delighting in every pitfall.

Jung would become the first psychologist to talk about the stages of life, using the analogy of the sun moving across the sky during the course of a day. In the first half of life, the focus is on getting a job, starting a family, succeeding in the world, etc. After the sun reaches the zenith at midday, its orientation shifts to the opposite direction as it moved towards its demise at the end of the day. In the second half of life the focus subtly shifts as getting one more promotion or continuing in the same old way becomes less and less fulfilling. Nagging questions arise about the purpose and meaning of life, where one is not being fulfilled, and what had been set aside to become established and successful. Questions about death and matters of the spirit grow in importance.

Otto Gross and the Felix Culpa

It was when the relationship with Spielrein reached the more personal, intimate phase that Jung poured out his soul and his feelings for her. Otto Gross was in the position of Mephistopheles in Milton's Paradise Lost and hell in William Blake's worldview (Ryley 1998, p. 141-144, 147, 148 and Merritt 2012b, appendix B) by representing the seductive, enlivening energy confined within repressed sexuality. The melting of the doctor-patient boundary between Jung and Gross with its strong unconscious affect was another powerful example of countertransference. (Bair 2003, p. 141-144, 156) The felix culpa (the “fortunate accident,” the blessed sin leading to redemption) that followed, with Gross's encouragement, was Jung's affair with Spielrein that opened Jung up to his soul, painful and difficult as the process was. The erotic interaction was probably not as depicted in Method but as described in Spielrein's diary and letters discovered subsequent to the book the film was base on. The “poetry” between them (Spielrein's word for their intimacies) was romantic swooning as they looked into each others eyes and holding, touching and kissing. (Lothane 1999, p. 1201) Freud and Jung as the first generation of analysts had not been analyzed, aside from the rather informal work they did with each other's dreams. They found it difficult to discuss such personal and intimate matters with their colleagues and followers, as Freud did when he refused to provide Jung with associations to his dream because he feared it would threaten his authority. Discussing deep, personal issues with a woman, albeit a former patient, that Jung has fallen in love with was an avenue for him to explore his darker unconscious side with a sympathetic and supportive listener and admirer.

Discovery of the Anima

Jung's relationship with Spielrein became the experiential base for what years later he would come to all the “anima,” the inner woman in a man. The German's have a saying: “every man has a woman within.” The “animus” is the inner male equivalent in the female psyche. A woman represents for a man what is closest to him as a member of the human species yet in so many basic ways is his opposite. As such she compliments the male's psyche and intimacy with her gives the male a sense of wholeness and completion. Because she is so much “the other,” a female represents for a male the deeper layers of the unconscious, something we are intimately a part of and always relating to, but ultimately a mystery and a source of fascination. So profound is the symbolic importance of the opposite sex that Jung called the anima and animus the archetype of the soul.

Significant influences on the formation of a particular man's anima come from the experience of his mother, sisters, and significant other women in a man's childhood. There is a strong unconscious and mysterious attraction when a man meets a woman that resonates with his sense of his inner woman. Emma Jung provided the stable, secure, provider and motherly side that Jung needed and she dutifully assumed her role as a wealthy Swiss housewife and child bearer. Spielrein was a different story. She represented a wildness, freedom and exotic feminine and soul experience because of her Russian Jewishness, her active and excellent mind, and her boldness in dealing with academics. (Bair 2003, p. 91) Freedom was of utmost importance for her—and for Jung's psyche. Jung's mother was a hysteric, another unconscious connection for Jung to Spielrein.

The Incestuous Early Days of Psychoanalysis

Jung's sexual involvement with Spielrein put him into an extremely difficult and embarrassing situation within the incestuous early days of the small psychoanalytic community. He was discussing his dreams and difficulties of his cases with Freud, including Spielrein, while Emma was also doing some analysis with Freud. Freud's sister-in-law, Minna, who was living with Freud's family, confided in Jung upon Jung's first visit with Freud that she was having an affair with Freud. (Bair 2003, p. 119, 120, 164, 689 note 51) Spielrein went on to analyze with Freud after leaving Jung.

Spielrein became the real heroine in the story and represents the beginning of the return of the repressed feminine into the Western psyche. Raging beatings on her buttocks as a child by her moody, tyrannical father distorted her sexuality (Bair 2003, p. 87), but she developed her intellect and forged her way through the male dominated world of academia and the all-male world of the first generation of analysts. She carried the banner of the archetypal feminine and Eros in her insistence that Jung acknowledge and honor the love he felt for her and her importance in the life of his soul. To Jung's credit, he ate humble pie and confessed to Freud his level of involvement with her rather than blaming it all on Eve as the crazy, seductive, lying woman. (Lothane 1999, p. 1200) Spielrein was important in helping Jung formulate some of his ideas (Bair 2003, p. 283-285) and her concepts of death and ego extinction during sexual intimacy led Freud to develop his formulation of the death instinct. (Lothane 1999, p. 1202) She became a psychoanalyst and taught others in Russia.

The Split Between Jung and Freud

There were several key factors that led to the split between Freud and Jung and Spielrein was not a significant one. (Lothane 1999, p. 1201) Jung had developed important concepts and published research before he met Freud, and as mentioned, was working in one of the leading clinics in the world. Practicing in a state hospital, he experienced a much broader range of patients than Freud. He realized there were many factors that could lead to severe mental problems—abusive parents, alcoholism in the family, extreme poverty, etc. Working with schizophrenics exposed him to the mythic dimension of human experience as every clinic before the age of heavy psychotropics had its God, Jesus, the Devil and the Virgin Mary. Jung knew after his first meeting with Freud that Freud was a truly remarkable man who was making enormous contributions to the understanding of the psyche, but he was trapped in his attempt to be totally objective and treat the psyche scientifically. Freud got very emotional and irrational when talking about his theory of sexuality, and Jung saw that as his religion in this very anti-religious man. Jung came to believe that Freud was a bitter, cynical person because he tried to reduce the psyche to a biological, materialistic level and failed to see the spiritual and symbolic dimensions of sexuality—he was his own worst enemy. (Jung 1961, p. 149-152; Merritt 2012b, chapter 4) He would come to criticize the Freudians for being trapped in Freud's Oedipal complex, running every psyche through that Procrustean bed. (In Greek myth, Procrustes was a innkeeper who had one iron bed. If the guest was too tall, he cut him to size to fit the bed; if too short, he stretched them out) (Jung 1961, p. 167) Spielrein admitted Freud's concepts worked with her, and it works for those whose Oedipal conflicts dominate. Jung emphasized that there is a whole host of Greek and other myths, and we can get trapped in any of them. Also, he said every theoretical system is the subjective confession of its creator.

When Jung was writing Symbols of Transformation, published in 1912, he got stuck on the section where he would provide a non-sexual concept of the libido. He described it as general psychic energy that can take any form, not just sexual. He insisted that Freud missed the symbolic dimension of sexuality, with sexual union being a common image for the union of opposites and the sense of wholeness. (Collected Works 8, p. 3-66) He knew this formulation would spell the end of his relationship with Freud, because Freud considered himself to be the founder and final authority on psychoanalysis. (Bair 2003, p. 241) Freud believed whatever he thought was true (p. 722 note 50), and he was merciless with those who disagreed with him. (p. 227) Jung also believed there was more to be hoped for out of the psychoanalytic process than being a “normal neurotic” who accepts the dismal reality of existence. (Jung 1961, p. 166) Out of the dark depths of the unconscious can arise the beautiful products of the creative process—inspiring works of art and religious symbols. Freud interpreted these thing as the products of sublimated sexuality. Jung was desperate to find a father figure, and they mutually agreed that Freud served that function. This made it even more difficult for Jung to disagree with Freud and ultimately split from him.

Synchronicity and the Occult versus Science

Another huge difference arose during their first meeting, an encounter that lasted for 13 hours: “a world happened then,” Jung remarked. (Bair 2003, p. 117) Jung was thoroughly steeped in spirituality and occult phenomena, having done his doctoral thesis in medical school on the occult phenomena presumably arising during seances conducted by his cousin. Freud, more a product of the Enlightenment, was rightfully concerned about developing a more objective study of the psyche and establishing it on a more reputable base. Only with the rise of transpersonal psychology in the 1970's have significant numbers of psychologists turned to the study of shamans, mystics and yogis as legitimate explorations of the farther valid and rich dimensions of the human experience.

“Jewish” versus “Christian” Psychoanalysis

An issue Freud mentioned in the film was the difference between his constructs of the psyche and their appropriateness for Jews (more worldly, materialistic and pessimistic) in contrast to Jung's Aryan, Christian concepts (like sin, redemption, salvation, and an other-worldly spirituality). (Hillman 1990, 2003) From the beginning Freud accused Jung of being anti-Semitic and that charge has bedeviled Jung ever since (see Bair 2003 index “anti-Semitism” on p. 858). The matter is complicated by the many aspects of Jung's thought that paralleled Nazi beliefs and his behavior during the early years of Nazi Germany. Issue included the difference between the Jewish and Christian cultural (“racial”) unconscious and the relevance of the Freudian psychoanalytic approach to a Christian psyche; Jung's criticism of Freud, a Jew, and his followers for their narrow focus on the Oedipal complex and a materialist, reductive, biological approach to the psyche; Jung's emphasis on the importance of a connection to the land and an awareness of one's cultural roots and history; the significance of symbols in the cultural evolution of the human race; Jung's idea that the imposition of the more culturally developed and refined Christian religion upon the barbaric Teutonic tribes cut them off from the “two million-year-old man within”--a man connected to the earth, seasons, and the symbolic world; and Jung's understanding from personal experience and from his study of alchemy that it is necessary to go through a dangerous period of darkness and chaos for new, healing and integrative energies and symbols to emerge. The positive ecological aspects of all these issues except the first are discussed in Merritt 2011a. Jung's conduct during the late 1920's and early 1930's led to legitimate concerns about possible Nazi sympathies (see Sherry 2011 and the critique of Sherry in Stein 2011) but this must be viewed within the larger framework of his thoughts—individual freedom, individuation, freedom from oppression from the right, the left and the collective, and acceptance of all cultural and religious perspectives as long as they are not forced upon others or destroy human and other forms of life. It must also be noted that both men engaged in most heinous form of character assassination after the break. (Shamdasani 2005, p. 52, 72; Bair 2003, p. 235, 238, p. 725 note 102)

Jung's Dark Night of the Soul

The film ends in July 16, 1913 with Spielrein talking to Jung, at Emma's request, because of Emma's concern for the disturbed state of Jung's psyche. In actuality Jung never saw Spielrein after she left Zurich in 1910 and married in 1912. (Bair 2003, p. 191, 192, 194, 712 note 21) Toni Wolff was hospitalized under Jung's care in 1910 and he developed an intense relationship with her in 1913 after she had been his patient. The relationship reached an erotic peak in mid-1914. This was the second of three times in their married life that Emma's threatened a divorce, each time resulting in Jung getting ill or having an accident. (p. 191) Jung went into a chaotic and frightening descent into his unconscious beginning after the last contact with Freud and the psychoanalytic conference in Munich in September of 1913. In October he had the first of three visions over a period of several months, the theme being a flood over all of Europe carrying blood and debris to the base of the Swiss alps. (Jung 1961, p. 175, 176) For 3-1/2 years Jung engaged in a shamanistic journey through the depths of his personal and the collective Western psyche, realizing he was in the domain of psychotics and the mentally ill. He exercised a superhuman strength in engaging the powers of the unconscious (p. 173), and it was Tony Wolff who had an uncanny knack for being able to relate to the strange material emerging from Jung's unconscious and could remain unflappable in accompanying Jung through his dark and strange night of the soul. (Bair 2003, p. 249, 266, 321, 322; Hannah 1976, p. 119, 120) It is believed that Emma may have tolerated her presence, even in their own household, because she realized the desperate state Jung was in and knowing she could not be the one to be with him on that journey. (Bair 2003, p. 388) He resigned from his teaching position at the university, lost most of his friends and colleagues, and barely held on to his sanity. During that period he developed the techniques that were to become standard practice in Jungian psychoanalysis. He actively engaged the unconscious through art work, playing in the sand [this developed into sandplay therapy (Jung 1961, p. 173-175 and http://www.dennismerrittjungiananalyst.com/Sandplay_Therapy.htm)], dialoguing with inner figures (Jung 1961, p. 181-189), and totally abandoning Freud's concepts and practices. Jung took a “don't know” approach to his patient's dreams, exploring with them the contents of their dreams. He discovered the anima and ultimately his greatest discovery, the Self. (p. 196, 197) He described the Self as the center and centering element in the psyche, experienced as the image of God within, and at the cultural level as God, Jesus, Yahweh, Buddha, Wakantanka (Lakota Sioux), etc. The elaborate paintings and coded writings Jung did during that period, that tapered off considerably after the initial 3 years, were finally published in 2009 in the form of The Red Book.

Alchemy and Jungian Ecopsychology

Jung said he spent the rest of his life figuring out what happened to him during those 3-plus years and putting the experience into psychological terms. (Jung 1961, p. 199) After dabbling in the Cabbalah and Gnosticism, he eventually found the historical and cultural equivalent to his personal journey in his 10 year study of alchemy before realizing they were speaking symbolically. (p. 205) Some of the alchemists knew they were not literally trying to turn lead into gold but it was a process of spiritual transformation of the base elements of human nature into the highest spiritual values. Only by going through the darkness in one's life and one's culture--the lead (the “pits”), the rejected elements-- can one become enlightened. Jung said the alchemists were unconsciously projecting the post-Christian unconscious into their vessels and retorts, seeking to redeem and transform the rejected elements of Christianity—the feminine, the body, sexuality, animals and nature. They believed Christ had saved the microcosm, the inner man, but they were working with God as co-creators to save the macrocosm, the world of nature, by re-ensouling nature and discovering the spirit in matter.

Alchemy became Jung's main symbolic system and lens through which he described his “confrontation with the unconscious” and his approach to psychoanalysis. I see alchemy as the base for a Jungian contribution to the new field of ecopsychology, a brand of psychology that studies how our values, attitudes, and perceptions of the environment condition our relationship to it. It also explores ways of connecting people more deeply to the environment and, like deep ecology, advocates a deep analysis of the problems in our relationship with nature. Jungian psychology provides the deepest analysis of Western culture through its exploration of the aspects of our Judeo-Christian myth that led to our dysfunctional relationship to the feminine, our bodies and sexuality, and to animals and the rest of nature. This is described in Jung's Collected Works, volume 11, “Answer to Job,” p. 355-470 and summarized in Merritt 2012a, p. 54-70. Jung associated the Christian era with the age of Pisces and strongly believed a necessary paradigm shift was imminent in the West because of the consequences of our repression of the feminine, the increasing rate of our destruction of the environment, the emptiness of the consumer culture now permeating the world, the rapes of the existing indigenous cultures, overpopulation, the atom bomb, and the massive destructive forces like Fascism, Communism and huge business entities (Jung died in 1961). He coined the terms “New Age” and “Age of Aquarius” to describe this paradigm shift, and many see 1968 (my first full year in graduate school in Berkeley) as the beginning of that age, indeed a revolutionary year in America and other parts of the world.

Sabina Spielrein, Forerunner of the Age of Aquarius

As a Zurich trained Jungian analyst and ecologist (I have a Ph.D. in entomology from Berkeley), I have developed the ecological dimensions of Jung's concepts in my 4 volumes of The Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe—Jung, Hermes, and Ecopsychology (that's a picture of my home farm in Wisconsin on the cover of volume 1). Jung believed the most significant element in the dawning of this new age would be the elevation of archetypal feminine energies in Western culture and in the world. I see Sabina Spielrein as the person who, in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement, strongly nudged the Western patriarchal collective psyche in the direction of incorporating the archetypal feminine, and one of those movers who initiated the shift toward the Age of Aquarius. Her concept of the death of the ego and transformation in intimate sexual relationship is straight out of the old goddess cults, where death and rebirth had seasonal associations and erotic dimensions as practiced by the sacred prostitutes. (see Redgrove 1987, Qualls-Corbett 1988, Hillel 1997, and Merritt 2012c, Appendix G: The Sacred Prostitute and the Erotic Feminine and Appendix H: The Black Goddess)

Dennis Merritt, Ph.D., LCSW, is a Jungian psychoanalyst and ecopsychologist in private practice in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr. Merritt is a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich and also holds the following degrees: M.A. Humanistic Psychology-Clinical, Sonoma State University, California, Ph.D. Insect Pathology, University of California-Berkeley, M.S. Entomology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, B.S. Entomology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over twenty years of participation in Lakota Sioux ceremonies have strongly influenced his worldview.

Volume I: Jung and Ecopsychology presents the main premises of Jungian ecopsychology,offers some of Jung’s best ecopsychological quotes, and provides a brief overview of the evolution of our dysfunctional Western relationship with the environment. —ISBN 9781926715421

Dennis Merritt will be doing a reading from volume 1 of The Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe—Jung and Ecopsychology on March 19 at Boswell Books on 2559 N. Downer Ave. in Milwaukee, just down from the Downer Theater where I led discussions of A Dangerous Method after 7 showings of the film.

References

Bair, D. 2003. Jung: A Biography. Little, Brown and Co.: Boston and New York.

Ellenberger, H. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious—The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Basic Books: New York.

Hannah, B. 1991. Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir. Shambala: Boston.

Hillel, R. 1997. The Redemption of the Feminine Erotic Soul. Nicolas-Hays: York Beach, Maine.

Hillman 2003. A Note for Stanton Marlan. Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice 5 (2): 101-103.
1990. How Jewish is Archetypal Psychology? (Just a Little Note). Spring
Journal: Putnam, CT. p. 121-130.

Jung, C. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. 2^nd [CW] H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, eds. R.F.C. Hull, trans. Princeton University Press: Princeton , NJ.

CW 2. 1973. Experimental Researches.

CW 11. 1969. Psychology and Religion: West and East.

1961. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Aniela Jaffe, ed. Richard and Claire Winston, trans. Random House: New York.

2009. The Red Book. Sonu Shamdasani, ed. W.W. Norton & Company: NY.

Lothane, Z. 1999. Tender Love and Transference: Unpublished Letters of C. G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80: 1189-1204.
Merritt, D. L. 2012a. The Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe. Volume 1. Jung and Ecopsychology. Fisher King Press: Carmel, CA.

--2012b (April 2012 publication date). Volume 2. The Cry of Merlin—Jung as the Prototypical Ecopsychologist.

--2012c (June 2012 publication date) Volume 3. Hermes and the Cows--Hermes, Jungian Ecopsychology, and Complexity Theory.

Qualls-Corbett, N. 1988. The Sacred Prostitute—Eternal Aspect of the Feminine. Inner City Books: Toronto.

Redgrove, P. 1987. The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real. Grove Press: New York.

Ryley, N. 1998. The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations of the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness. Quest Books: Wheaton, IL.

Shamdasani, S. 2005. Jung Stripped Bare by his Biographers, Even. Karnac: London and New York.

Stein, M. 2011. Book Review of Carl Gustav Jung: Avant Garde Conservative by Jay Sherry. Spring 86: 281-299.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Lifting the Veil

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:36:00 PST

Fisher King Press to publish
Lifting the Veil

by Jane Kamerling and Fred Gustafson

Available May 15, 2012 - Advance Orders Welcomed

Lifting the Veil: Revealing the Other Side brings awareness to the unconscious and underlying dynamics that are reflected in the history and present day conflicts between the Islamic and Western worlds. The devastation and shock of 9/11 reached every community in America. It raised questions never before considered. Inspired by that event, research became critical to organize our thinking and make sense out of nonsense and organization out of chaos. Political literature addressing the dynamics leading up to the catastrophe of the collapse of the Twin Towers has been prolific as the urgency to understand the Islamic world has increased. International relations theory offers a variety of concepts of why and how nations may respond to one another for expansion, defense or peace. These theories develop with objective quantifiable equations and leave no room for immeasurable, subjective variables. Perception is one of those variables that can not be left out of the equation when looking at what motivates nations and international diplomacy. As Jungian analysts, Gustafson and Kamerling analyze an underlying psychological dynamic that fuels the conflict between the west and the Islamic world. They have distilled information from a variety of readings, interviews, documentaries and personal experiences in the Islamic world.

Jane Kamerling, L.C.S.W. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts and Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts. She is a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and has designed and co-directed the Clinical Training is a senior analyst who has lectured both nationally and internationality on the relationship of Jungian psychology to culture, mythology and religion. She has a full time analytical practice in Chicago.

Fred R. Gustafson, D. Min. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst (Zurich) and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts. He is a senior training analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and a clergy member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He has lectured both nationally and internationally on subjects related to Analytical Psychology and religion. He is the author of The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln: An Ancient Image for Our Present Time, Dancing Between Two Worlds; Jung and the Native American Soul and The Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine.

Product Details
* Lifting the Veil: Revealing the Other Side
* First Edition,160 pages, Paperback and eBook editions
* Publisher: Fisher King Press (May 2012)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1926715756
* ISBN-13: 978-1926715759

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

You need to wear your hair in a less ordinary way

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:38:00 PST

Chapter 2

by Patricia Damery

Fifteen people are seated around a very large, round table in an otherwise empty living room of an old San Francisco Victorian. Norma T., a robust and dramatic woman in her 60s who sits directly across the table from me, is obviously in charge. She instructs us to put our hands palm down on the tabletop. She claims to be in a trance, although she appears to be present and alert. She could be teaching math, given her matter-of-fact demeanor.

The skeptic in me scans the room. Who comes to a séance, anyway? Most of the people look fairly ordinary: a petite woman with short white hair; a business man in a suit; a young man with a backpack next to his chair; me, a candidate in training to be a Jungian analyst. This could be any-committee-meeting-USA, I think, or a Sunday school class…that is, until the table starts jumping.

At first I am annoyed. I suspect someone is bumping a table leg with a knee. But as the tempo increases and Norma comments that the energy is particularly strong this evening, I realize that the table’s legs are actually leaving the floor at times. I am shocked. As if from a long distance, I can hear Norma “channeling” to the woman with the short white hair. A dead relative is apparently giving her some kind of guidance. The skeptic in me is having a heyday, but my attention is riveted on the phenomenon of the bouncing table. I feel as if I am going to throw up. The room is spinning.

Norma finishes with the woman and calls my name. She will “read” for me next. She seems to know my condition and says, “You become nauseated when Spirit speaks to you.” I try to center myself. I do not remember what she tells me, except, "You need to wear your hair in a less ordinary way"—a comment that insults me. What I remember most is my altered sense of reality.

The bouncing table challenges my ideas about how the physical world operates. It has taken me years to work through my resistance and get to this strange gathering, and it will be two more before I am ready for any real instruction from Norma T.—instruction, as it turns out, that is necessary for me to heal a deep wound in my sense of self and move on in my life.

The Dream Pond

Until I met my husband Donald, I had no intention of ever returning to the land. I left the family farm as soon as I was able. At the beginning of freshman year, while other students cried when their parents left them at the college dorm, I wandered the campus in ecstasy.

I hated fieldwork and the constant labor of the farm. Small town life was suffocating. I was on to better things, whatever those ‘things’ might be. After a few false turns, those ‘things’ came to include California and psychology, and my relationship to the earth became more that of the hunter-gatherer—not tethered to a particular plot of ground, where a farmer spends every waking moment of every day.

Yet I eventually married a man tied to the land in his own way, an architect with a vineyard in the Napa Valley of California, and my sons and I came to live on his property. One strand of this story is about redeveloping my relationship with the land, being rooted once again in a particular place and being guided by the tenets of Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamic agriculture. A second strand is about my professional path of becoming a Jungian analyst. Surprisingly, these two seemingly unrelated strands in my life are deeply intertwined.

A most useful tool of a Jungian analyst is the dream. Dreams reflect the spiritual life of the psyche and often compensate for what we consciously suppress or reflect what has not yet come into consciousness. Those dreams that announce the beginning of a new cycle in an analysis or a life are particularly important.

My first remembered dream reoccurred several times in early childhood. It first visited when I was about three. I wander out over the grassy field west of our country church, the area my parents would later choose for their gravesite, and the place my brother, sisters, and I would bury what remained of their ashes. I walk as far as you can see from the church, and then I enter into an area dense with vegetation where I have never been. A rich, fungal scent permeates the air. Nestled in a slight dip in the land is a small pond. Two mallards float in the water, which is as still as a scrying mirror.

The most remarkable part of this dream is the feeling that I am inseparable from all that surrounds me: the ducks, the pond, the dense vegetation, and the horizon. My body is still my three-year-old body—yet it stretches to the horizons. There is a feeling of great peace and wholeness.

As a child I would awaken from the dream compelled to search for the pond in the waking world—not because I thought it could be found, but because while searching, the feeling state of the dream intensified, and I felt at one with my surroundings. This feeling was also experienced when I stared west into the cornfield at twilight, the stalks tall and tasseled, pollen thick in the air—a sense of portent that would take years to understand.

All my life I have treasured my awareness of two realities: the outer experience, in which we all live most of the time, and its rich inner counterpart. In the best of circumstances, like notes in a chord, these two worlds harmonize in a way that enhances the experience of both realities.

Some psychological theories describe a move into the inner world as defensive, an adaptation some human beings develop in order to cope with unbearable aspects of life. In some circumstances this is true. There is such a thing as a schizoid defense, in which a person engages more with fantasy life than with living people or real-life challenges.

But my own experiences have taught me that the urge to develop an inner, spiritual life is a healthy and often imperative impulse. Certainly, this drew me to the philosophy and teaching of C.G. Jung, as is the case for many of us who become analysts or analysands.

Jung held that “the psychological problem of today is a spiritual problem, a religious problem. Man today hungers and thirsts for a safe relationship to the psychic forces within himself. His consciousness, recoiling from the difficulties of the modern world, lacks a relationship to safe spiritual conditions. This makes him neurotic, ill, frightened.”[1] Jung’s life work revolved largely around this point, impelling man to understand that God is working to become conscious through man, and that the meaning of the Christ had to do with the indwelling of spirit in matter.

Western psychology, and Western thought in general, tends to ignore or actively reject the notion of spirit. Sadly, in recent years even Jung’s analytical psychology often does not embrace the “spiritual.” When using this term, I am talking about the inner realm perceived through meditation, prayer, active imagination, or simply turning one’s attention inward, and indeed people have done so throughout the ages and in every known culture. There we may experience images, sounds, and bodily sensations, feelings that have special power and meaning for us.

Some of my analyst colleagues have become phobic of the spiritual perspective, fearful that they will be accused of being “ungrounded” or even psychotic, particularly since even Carl Jung has been labeled psychotic by some in the psychological community. This has prevented many analysts from intimately knowing or even acknowledging the reality of the inner landscape that is, by its very nature, spiritual. In fact, one of analytical psychology’s inheritances is the essential work of regaining psychological balance through reconnecting with one’s inner spiritual resources.

For me, receiving training in accessing and understanding non-ordinary states brought a larger perspective. My psychic teacher, Norma T., often said, “You are only partly here; most of you is out there…” Jung talked about this in other ways. He described man as having two souls—the impersonal, or ancestral, soul he was born into this life with, and the personal soul that he develops in this life. The newborn’s mind is, Jung says, “a finished structure…the result of innumerable lives before his and is far from being devoid of content.”[2] He described these two souls in man as often being in direct opposition and held that dreams and active imagination often deal with the conflicts between them.

Jung asserted, “All dreams reveal spiritual experiences, provided one does not apply one’s own point of view to the interpretation of them.”[3] Interpretation involves thinking and differentiation, prominent aspects of the masculine principle. Listening to spirit requires a very different approach, one into which I was unwittingly initiated during my years of training at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, primarily through experiences outside the actual training.

My childhood dream seeded me with an experience our culture as a rule does not support. The dream was so compelling that I could never forget it. Growing up on a farm, spending long hours alone, or playing with my sister outdoors in the natural world sprouted that seed. I began to experience non-ordinary reality early on, but until I developed tools to navigate this other state and my ego grew strong enough to use them, these experiences remained mostly split off from the rest of my life.

* * *

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the great, great granddaddy of both Jung’s analytical psychology and Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic agriculture. A German poet and philosopher living at the turn of the 19th century, Goethe is perhaps best known to the psychological community for his book-length poem Faust, but he also made significant scientific contributions, especially in botany and the science of color. Much of his insight came via intensive direct observation and a resulting consciousness similar to my dream pond consciousness. To know something, he proposed, means to hold all aspects of it at the same time. Only when you hold all of the parts at once does a complete picture come into focus, a kind of unity consciousness. “If you would seek comfort in the whole,” Goethe declared, “you must learn to discover the Whole in the smallest part.”[4]

The first editor of Goethe’s scientific work, Rudolf Steiner, was born in 1861, almost 30 years after Goethe’s death. In 1889 Steiner was hired to edit Goethe’s scientific papers. As he pored over the great man’s work, he became convinced that Goethe’s way of knowing produced a state of consciousness quite distinct from the mechanistic worldview widely accepted even to this day. For the rest of his life, Steiner worked to develop and teach this “new” consciousness, which he recognized as the direct perception of the spirit world that he, too, had experienced from an early age.

Biodynamics is the agricultural extension of this way of knowing. Using his natural clairvoyance, Steiner studied the etheric formative forces influencing the life of the land and plants and devised ways to balance them. In keeping with Goethe’s thought, he observed that there is nothing in nature that does not bear relation to the whole. The work for the farmer, then, is not killing the aphids that have suddenly arrived on the lettuce, but studying the conditions that resulted in the appearance of aphids and using developed thinking to comprehend the connections between them. This process, done correctly, produces a state of consciousness similar to what I experienced in my pond dream.

Carl Gustav Jung II was born in 1875, the son of a pastor. It was rumored that Jung’s namesake and grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung I, was conceived in a liaison between his great grandmother, Sophie Jung Zeigler, and Goethe himself. I suspect that Jung believed this and felt a deep kinship with the great philosopher poet.

Jung found special significance in Goethe’s Faust poem, which depicts the process of redemption and individuation through a painful holding of opposites. In Goethe’s version of this myth, Faust grapples with his inner darkness through the figure of Mephistopheles and, in doing so, develops a new conscious attitude. Jung felt this attitude offered redemption through a recovery of the feminine principle.

I still vividly remember sitting in my country church as a child, the P.A. system buzzing as the pastor drones on through his sermon. Through the open west windows comes the laboring hum of a tractor, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Birdsong is sweet and persistent. Even with the minister’s amplified voice, I can distinguish the melodic yet harsh song of red-winged black birds, the coos of mourning doves, the Bob…Whites!

Feet shuffle. To the right, my father’s napping form slumps against the hard oak pew’s splintery smoothness. The June heat is oppressive. I sit very still. The grassy smell of freshly cut hay wafts in the windows.

Suddenly, I am aware of a Presence! It’s as if the Holy Ghost has descended into me and is viewing the sanctuary through my eyes, hearing the droning voice of the minister through my ears, feeling the sweat break through the pores of my body. I am also aware that this Presence is a larger part of me that is seldom noticed, but as this thought forms the moment passes.

This as an experience of the feminine principle, which is most often heart-centered, involving emotions and intuition. In contrast, had I experienced this moment in church primarily via the masculine principle, I would have used only my rational mind, listening to the words of the minister, comprehending the principles he was advocating, and applying them logically to what I should be thinking or doing in life. This activity, quite useful when it is kept in balance, is centered in the head rather than the heart.

In the past 300 years, most human societies have considered the masculine principle to be more important, more valuable, higher in some way. We have perceived the feminine principle as lacking import and being nonproductive, or we have relegated it to the purview of the mystic.

In truth, we need both ways of experiencing reality in order to live full and balanced lives. Embracing one and precluding the other leads inevitably to conflict within ourselves and between others.

* * *

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung described the Faust myth as his own. He identified with Faust’s fate, saying it “awakened in me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness.”[5] Through Faust, Goethe offered Jung “a basic outline and pattern”[6] for holding his own internal contradictions and developing his philosophies, which we study to this day.

It was Jung’s work that first provided a matrix for understanding my own experiences of Presence, or so-called non-ordinary reality. This was the only reason that, in my early twenties as graduate student of psychology, I was drawn to Jung, and initially to his work on alchemy. In no conscious way did I understand at that time what I was reading, and yet, on some deep level, I felt completely satisfied.

As I matured I wanted to understand these experiences and the images that appeared in my dreams and visions. It was then that, unconsciously and then consciously, I sought teachers.

You have just read an excerpt of Patricia Damery's
Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation

[1] C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interview and Encounters, “Does the World Stand on the Verge of Spiritual Rebirth?” 1934, p. 68.

[2] C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interview and Encounters, “Everyone Has Two Souls,” Edited by William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XCVII, p. 57 1932.

[3] C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interview and Encounters, “Does the World Stand on the Verge of Spiritual Rebirth?” p. 71.

[4] Jeremy Naydler, (Ed.), Goethe on science: An anthology of Goethe’s scientific writings. Edinburgh: Floris Books. p. 59, (1996).

[5] C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 235.

[6] C.G. Jung, MDR, p. 235.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

She’s certainly not about the ordinary business of life . . .

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 01:00:00 PST

The Sister from Below:
When the Muse Gets Her Way

a Jungian Perspective by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

The Sister speaks to all those who want to cultivate an unlived promise—those on a spiritual path, those who are filled with the urgency of poems that have to be written, paintings that must be painted, journeys that yearn to be taken…

Who is She, this Sister from Below? She’s certainly not about the ordinary business of life: work, shopping, making dinner. She speaks from other realms. If you’ll allow, She’ll whisper in your ear, lead your thoughts astray, fill you with strange yearnings, get you hot and bothered, send you off on some wild goose chase of a daydream, eat up hours of your time. She’s a siren, a seductress, a shape-shifter . . . Why listen to such a troublemaker? Because She is essential to the creative process: She holds the keys to the doors of our imaginations and deeper life—the evolution of Soul.

The Sister emerges out of reverie, dream, a fleeting memory, a difficult emotion—she is the moment of inspiration—the muse. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky writes of nine manifestations in which the muse visits her, stirring up creative ferment, filling her with ghosts, mysteries, erotic teachings, the old religion—bringing forth her voice as a poet. Among these forms of the muse are the “Sister from Below,” the inner poet who has spoken for the soul since language began. The muse also appears as the ghost of a grandmother Naomi never met, who died in the Shoah—a grandmother with ‘unfinished business.’ She visits in the form of Old Mother India, whose culture Naomi visited as a young woman. She cracks open her Western mind, flooding her with many gods and goddesses. She appears as Sappho, the great lyric poet of the ancient world, who engages her in a lovely midlife fantasy. She comes as “Die Ür Naomi,” an old woman from the biblical story for which Naomi was named, who insists on telling Her version of the Book of Ruth. And in the end, surprisingly, the muse appears in the form of a man, a long dead poet whom Naomi loved in her youth.

The Sister from Below is a personal story, yet universal, of giving up a creative calling because of life’s obligations, and being called back to it in later life. This forthcoming Fisher King Press publication describes the intricate patterns of a rich inner life; it is a traveler’s memoir, with outer journeys to Italy, India and a Neolithic cave in Bulgaria, and inward journeys to biblical Canaan and Sappho’s Greece; it is filled with mythic experience, a poet’s story told. The Sister conveys the lived experience of the creative life, a life in which active imagination—the Jungian technique of engaging with inner figures—is an essential practice.

eBook, Paperback, Download a Free PDF Sample at the Fisher King Press Online Bookstore.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is the author of The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots (2008) and numerous prose essays, many of which have been published in Psychological Perspectives and The Jung Journal. She has had poetry published in many literary magazines and anthologies, among them After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery, Weber Studies, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Tiferet and Asheville Poetry Review. Naomi has three published poetry collections, Adagio and Lamentation, red clay is talking (2000) and crimes of the dreamer. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times. Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice, poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives, and a grandmother many times over.

The cover image "Phases of the Moon" is an oil painting by Bianca Daalder-van Iersel, an artist and Jungian analyst practicing in Los Angeles, California. You can learn more about the artist and her work at www.bdaalder.com.

The Sister from Below : When the Muse Gets Her Way
—by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
ISBN 978-0-9810344-2-3

Riting Myth, Mythic Writing

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:04:00 PST

News Release - Fisher King Press to Publish:

Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story

by Dennis Patrick Slattery

Available June 1, 2012 - Advance Orders Welcomed.

Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story is both theoretical as well as an interactive book on the nature of personal myth. Its intention is to offer participants who wish to explore further the terms and structure of their personal myth over 80 writing meditations that are spread throughout 9 chapters in order to guide the readers-writers on a pilgrimage into the deepest layers of their personal myth.

An added feature of the book are writing meditation responses from participants who have been part of the author's writing retreats in both the United States and Europe. Their power and authenticity attests to the strong desire and need of each of us to explore what myth guides us, what terms it does so within and what one can learn to become more conscious of those deep forces in the psyche that seek expression in all we do and are.

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D., has been teaching for 42 years, the last 17 in the Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology and Depth Psychotherapy programs at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of 18 books and over 300 essays on scholarly and cultural topics as well as book and film reviews that have appeared in books, magazine, journals and newspapers.

Product Details
Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story
220 pages - Large 7.5 x 9.25 page format
First Edition
Publisher: Fisher King Press (June 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781926715773

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

Canadian & US Booksellers

fisherking@fisherkingpress.com — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:22:00 PST

For readers who would like to support their local bookseller foundations or institutions, Fisher King Press titles are available from:

For Canadian readers Caversham Booksellers in Toronto now stocks Fisher King Press psychology books.

Caversham Booksellers is an independent specialised bookshop whose doors opened October 15th, 1989. The founders were Dr. Christine Dunbar (psychiatrist and psychoanalyst) and Peter Heyworth (Professor of English for thirty years at University College, University of Toronto). We specialise in providing books for mental health professionals both through our store and by mail throughout the world.

Caversham Booksellers offer books for a wide range of specialties including, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, all forms of psychotherapy, trauma, Jungian analysis, neuroscience and many more. We also sell textbooks for many local schools and training centres.

More than that, though, Caversham is a community of often eccentric but knowledgable staff and interesting, interested and indeed often eccentric customers. Many of our customers we know personally as local authors, or experts in their fields. Some of them visit us two or three times a week, while others are afraid to come to our store because of the dangerous appeal of many of our books. Some of our best customers have never set forth in our store ordering books over the phone instead, making this website a logical extension of our service.

So please, browse through our sections and titles - they are are organised roughly how we organise our store. And don't forget to check out the other sections of this site as they are full of other useful information. And check back often because this site is constantly growing and changing.

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For Houston readers The Jung Center of Houston Bookstore stocks Fisher King Press psychology titles.

If you live nearby, stop in to browse their fine selection of books and gifts, selected with a special focus on psychology, humanities and the expressive arts. All required and suggested class readings are available at The Jung Center of Houston bookstore, located just inside the Center at 5200 Montrose Blvd. Remember, all purchases help to support the work of the Center. Any book you need or want can be ordered at The Jung Center Bookstore – not just psychology books. Members receive a discount on all purchases!

The Jung Center of Houston Book Store

5200 Montrose Blvd., Houston, Texas 77006

Business Hours: Monday–Thursday 12:00 noon – 7:00 pm / Closed on Friday / Saturday 10:00 am – 4:00 pm (Telephone 713-524-8253, ext. 18
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For New York City readers The C.G. Jung Foundation Bookstore stocks Fisher King Press psychology titles.

The C.G. Jung Foundation Book Service is both a bookstore and a mail-order service, offering a large and unique collection of Jung’s writings and Jungian-related literature. Our ever-growing inventory encompasses over 2,800 titles, focusing on works on varied subject matter relating to analytical psychology, such as mythology, symbolism, mid-life development, men and women’s issues, religion, the arts, astrology, and reference material. This wide selection distinguishes the C.G. Jung Foundation Book Service as the finest source of books for sale pertaining to analytical psychology on the East Coast.

The Book Service is housed on the first floor of the C.G. Jung Center, a brownstone conveniently located in midtown Manhattan. In the 1970’s the Book Service was a reading room where individuals interested in Jung’s ideas would meet, read, and discuss analytical psychology. This personal atmosphere continues here today, making one's visit a unique experience, which separates it from that of commercial bookstores.

Visit the foundation bookstore in person at:

The C.G. Jung Foundation Book Service
28 East 39th Street, New York, New York 10016

Business Hours:
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For Los Angeles readers The C.G. Jung Foundation Bookstore stocks Fisher King Press psychology titles.

The Los Angeles C.G. Jung Bookstore offers specialized and often hard-to-find publications relating to the life and work of C.G. Jung, writings by Jungian analysts and a wide range of topics relevant to analytical psychology, including titles on symbolism, mythology, fairy tales, spirituality and the psyche.

With community services as its foundation, the bookstore provides its patrons with books, videotapes, DVDs, selected professional journals and pamphlets, and audio-CDS of Institute-sponsored lectures (MP3 format*). Bookstore personnel are knowledgeable and will assist you with your interests and research. Spend time looking over our entire selection of book titles and gifts in a warm and welcoming environment.

Jungian Analyst Members of the IAAP and Analyst Candidates-in-Training, as well as Members of the Institute Library, Alchemist Circle and Analytical Psychology Club, receive a 10% discount on purchases of books and DVDs in the bookstore. KCRW Fringe Benefits and and KCET Infinity members also receive a 10% discount when they present their card.

The Bookstore is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5:00 p.m. except holidays. We are also usually open half an hour before Public Programs held at the Institute.

The Bookstore is located at the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles:

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The Pacifica Graduate Institute stocks Fisher King Press psychology titles.

Located in the renovated wine cellar of the former Fleischmann estate, the bookstore at Pacifica is an important and popular feature of campus life. Starting out on a borrowed shelf in the library, the bookstore has become an essential resource for students, faculty, staff, and conference participants.

We carry a selection of faculty publications, suggested course readings, a unique general reading and gift section, and we are particularly proud of our selection in the fields of counseling, clinical and depth psychology, and mythological studies.

Our collection includes many different literary works and publications with the primary emphasis on the following:

• Depth, Jungian, and Archetypal Psychology
• Religion, Mythology, Philosophy
• Joseph Campbell
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• James Hillman
• Pacifica Faculty and Alumni Publications

Please e-mail inquiries or requests to bookstore@pacifica.edu or phone 805.969.3626 extension 327. Special orders and shipping are available to students, faculty, staff, and conference participants. Your purchases support Pacifica programs!

Pacifica Bookstore
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email: bookstore@pacifica.edu
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Booksellers and institutions not listed above are invited to offer Fisher King Press titles to your readers. We ship internationally. Inquiries can be made by calling 1-800-228-9316 in the US & Canada, international calls +1-831-238-7799, or email to: fisherkingpress@gmail.com

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Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com