article by Lawrence H. Staples

Suffering: The Price Guilt Exacts

Guilt can cause prolonged suffering. We suffer regardless of whether the guilt serves essential human needs or not, whether it has outlived its usefulness or not, whether it is deserved or not, whether it is meaningful or not, and whether it was incurred intentionally or not. Nor does it matter whether we have a religious background or not, and if we have a religious background, it does not matter which religion. Even if our parents were atheists or agnostics, we are subject to guilt. They often had dogmatic and rigid beliefs of their own. With the possible exception of sociopaths, all of us suffer from guilt, to some degree. The point is that all guilt, regardless of its origin or meaning, brings pain that we need to treat and relieve.

Fortunately, the psyche has a self-regulatory function that helps soften the pain of guilt it inflicts. It appears to function somewhat like the sympathetic and parasympathetic operation of the physical body’s autonomic nervous system that protects us with its opposite tendencies. In the physical body’s system, one part may dilate the pupil and the other contract it. One part may inhibit the heartbeat while the other stimulates it.

The mechanism of guilt formation gives us a clue as to how protective opposition works similarly in the psyche. The mechanism of guilt formation is complex. Much of it takes place out of our awareness. What begins as conscious guilt that is palpably felt, is often displaced by other thoughts and feelings. That is, the initially conscious guilt tends to become unconscious. The ego is protected with a variety of “autonomic” defenses, like rationalization, displacement, and projection. We “sin” and then we experience guilt. Then, in retrospect, we rework the experience and with the aid of ego defenses come to a new formulation that dresses our guilt in new meaning. For example, we may come to blame others for our transgressions. Or our sexual instincts may overwhelm us. After enough transgressions, and enough processing of our guilt, we often can come to feel that sex is okay. At that point the guilt experienced drops into the unconscious and is replaced by justifications. This reworking of our guilt gives us temporary relief. The defenses that render our guilt unconscious and less painful operate involuntarily.

Part of the paradoxical beauty of the psyche is its capacity to create one thing and its opposite. It can create pain and it can soothe the very pain it creates. Like the body, however, the psyche can be assaulted by disorders that overwhelm its natural defenses and require intervention. In the case of guilt, the feeling, after it has been treated by our natural defenses, is buried in the unconscious. While the guilt may for long periods in our life not cause intolerable pain, it can fester, become toxic, and behave as a kind of saboteur. Then, later it may overwhelm the old defenses and storm back into conscious awareness. At that time, we face the pain again and have to assuage it.

Our earliest experience of guilt in childhood is like a kind of psychic slap that disturbs our youthful innocence. Guilt shatters the psychic wholeness with which we are born. Unfortunately, some of the split off parts are not intrinsically bad. They are needed to complete our development.

No matter how we incurred the guilt, we eventually need to seek relief from its pain. The means of expiating guilt is as important to optimal human development as guilt itself. Without the means of relief, guilt induced suicide might become a greater threat to human existence than disease. Part of the healing process involves becoming conscious of the nature and origin of the many types of guilt we experience. The following sections outline some of the spiritual, psychological, and educational steps we can take to assuage its wounds.

Giving Back: The Promethean Way to Assuage our Guilt

Because guilt is important in the formation and maintenance of the opposites and, thus, consciousness, and because it also serves the self-regulatory functions of the psyche, it appears to be a necessity for human life, just as food is. While food is a necessity, its waste products, nevertheless, have to be discharged after the food has performed its essential function of providing nutrients. Otherwise, the waste becomes toxic and makes us ill. It makes no difference whether the food we originally ingested was “good” or “bad,” nutritious or unhealthy. Similarly, it makes little difference whether the guilt was good for us or not so good, it has to be discharged or it will make us sick. With food the waste product itself becomes valuable when it is converted into fertilizer. When unassimilated guilt is discharged in the form of giving back to society, the otherwise toxic portion of guilt is converted into something valuable. This is the Promethean Way to discharge guilt. It is an especially effective way to relieve guilt that has overwhelmed our self-regulatory protective functions. It is precisely because guilt is a necessity that we must find ways to discharge its residual toxicity.

We have to give value back to the community if we are to discharge the guilt we incur for transgressing collective mores. Psychologically and spiritually it satisfies a deep human need. Our mythology reflects the ancient wisdom that this is so.

In Part I of Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, I touched briefly on the lives of many famous figures that “sinned” but gave much back. Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Alfred Kinsey, Rosa Parks, Betty Friedan, Darwin, Solzhenitsyn, Susan B. Anthony, Nelson Mandela and many other audacious people pushed themselves far outside the conventional fences that had been built around them. They also contributed much to the very societies whose rules they broke. Life is clearly full of examples of “bad” people giving something good to society. This could also include the so-called Robber Barons such as the Vanderbilts and Andrew Carnegie. The guilt-ridden Carnegie gave us magnificent libraries. All of these famous individuals were “sinners,” violators of the mores and existing standards of the communities in which they lived.

Individuation is an enlargement of personality. We become whole. We become bigger and more complete. The most important thing we can return to society is a fuller self. This fuller self might be expressed in music or painting or poetry or dance. It might be expressed in science or medicine. It might be expressed as a political or military revolutionary. It might be expressed as a tutor or a teacher, as a minister or a therapist, or as a community volunteer in countless ways. Or it may be expressed simply as a caring person, who gives helpful time and energy to family and friends. One does not have to be so grand as Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer or Mahatma Gandhi to return real value to the world. The giving of our complete selves to the collective is a ransom we pay for being an individual in a collective society. A more complete self is the currency we pay as expiation for the achievement of individuality.

There are many who quietly and inconspicuously follow the Promethean way without wide recognition. One example of someone going outside the fence, into the shadow, and finding there something that eventually served her own growth and contributed to the community is a woman patient who in the spring of her senior year in high school, when 17 years old, received a scholarship to a prestigious college. From a poor family, a scholarship was the only way she could get an education and escape poverty and abuse. About the same time she got the scholarship, however, she also got pregnant. While teen pregnancy is not easy even today, it then carried almost unbearable guilt and untold complications. Abortion was not an option for her; she was both Catholic and poor. The church and her devout parents were opposed to her giving the baby up. After much agonizing she decided to offer her baby for adoption so that she could accept the scholarship. She carried and wrestled with a heavy load of guilt for most of her adult life. The burden she carried stemmed not only from her sexual conduct but also from her feeling of selfishness that was unavoidable when she gave priority to her educational opportunity. The guilt eroded her sense of self-esteem and self-worth and she searched for ways to find peace.

Despite the burden of this experience, she became a highly respected researcher in the area of children’s health. She made contributions that were of substantial benefit to her special discipline. She came to feel that her work and contributions were driven by her need to expiate her guilt, regain some of her lost sense of worth, and find some modicum of peace. We could speculate that the very nature of her “sins” led her to the particular field she chose and uniquely qualified her for that work. Who is to say what the “right” decision would have been? The scholarship was the only way she saw to develop her enormous gifts. We never know the road not taken but we do know that her way led her to contribute more, perhaps, to children than the raising of a single child. While we can’t be sure of this latter point, we do know for a fact that she did much good. In high school, she had jumped outside the fence and violated all her conventional and religious upbringing. Her work as an adult helped her come back inside the fence and bring with her useful, new knowledge and some relief from her profound feelings of guilt.

Another example is a patient I’ll call Ellis. Both the blessing and the curse of alcoholism can be seen in the story of this recovered alcoholic. Ellis started off in a blaze, fizzled badly, and then later reignited to lead a wonderfully useful life. He graduated with high honors from college, started as a reporter, married, and had a nice family. He was not long out of college, however, before he became a serious drinker. The booze did not seem to interfere with his life at first. He was an incredibly good investigative reporter, and his abilities were recognized. Over the years, however, his drinking steadily increased and he began to miss assignments and deadlines. The owner and editors put up with it because he was so good. Even when they knew he was drinking on the job, he could write better when he was half drunk than most people could sober. Things finally reached the point when the publisher and owner confronted him. His slurred response was that his personal business was none of the publisher’s business and the publisher could kiss his ass. Not surprisingly, he was fired. Not only did he lose his job, but also his wife divorced him, and his children refused to speak to him.

Luckily, he found AA. He got sober, and back into newspaper work. It was not easy because his reputation had preceded him, but his talents blossomed again and in a few years he was a managing editor. He attended AA meetings several times a week and began to lead a quiet, helpful life. He found that his spiritual practices and helping other alcoholics relieved a lot of the burden of the guilt he carried. During the rest of his life, he helped hundreds of alcoholics recover.

Ray was one of the alcoholics Ellis helped. When he was drinking, Ray was bad, and he ended up on a chain gang. Ellis led AA meetings at prisons, where he met Ray. Ellis could see that Ray was bright and curious, even though he had not finished high school. When Ray was released, Ellis offered him a menial job at the newspaper. Soon, Ellis was teaching him how to write, and it quickly became clear that Ray had real gifts, and soon became a feature editor.

After leaving newspaper work, Ray wrote several novels, and also taught writing at local colleges. For the remainder of his life Ray helped hundreds of other alcoholics recover. Whether helping other alcoholics or contributing to the community in other ways, many recovered alcoholics give much back to society. It is an important way for them to deal with their guilt. Much of the giving back they do is invisible and unrecognized, because it is done anonymously, in line with the principles of AA.

Like most people, alcoholics usually start life inside the barbed wire fence that surrounds their egos, but most then venture far outside the fence. Some then move back inside the fence, where they contribute in ways usually not widely seen or noted. They bring back knowledge and experience gained, painfully, outside the fence. The knowledge and experience they gain outside the fence actually turn out to be gifts that uniquely equip them to help other alcoholics. No one can help alcoholics as effectively as recovered alcoholics, who have paid a huge price to gain this particular helping gift. If an alcoholic comes to me while he is still drinking, I encourage him to go to AA. I tell him that I cannot help him until he gets sober. Practicing alcoholics have a hard time telling the truth. Active alcoholics going to therapists are like someone going to an internist with another person’s urine sample. The therapist would be working with false data and cannot be of much help. On the other hand, alcoholics who are sober and who have done the AA spiritual work are among the most honest people I know.

Alcoholics generally experience enormous guilt. They need much help to heal deep wounds. Most recovered alcoholics find giving back to be a powerful salve for those wounds.

Because guilt is a necessity that causes us to suffer, and because giving back relieves our suffering, it is enlightened self-interest to do it.

Other Spiritual Approaches

It is as if from the beginning we have been “wired” to sin, to incur guilt, and then to seek some way to atone for it. It is the pervasive experience of guilt, and humanity’s need for relief from it, that led most healers, in various cultures and societies, to devise ways to help people deal with guilt.

For example, Yom Kippur is an important Jewish holiday, called the Day of Atonement, a ritual that helps them deal with the experience of guilt. The other great religions also have rituals that serve this purpose. In the Christian community, baptism is a widely practiced ritual whose purpose, among others, is the washing away of guilt and the forgiveness of sin. Confession, a ritual practiced in differing ways, tends to ease the pain and the burden of guilt.

In years past, most people who suffered guilt went to their priest or minister or rabbi for help. However, some of those who turned to religion for relief were acting like alcoholics who turned to drink for relief, to the “hair of the dog that bit them.” Most religions, however, do have spiritual tools that can help assuage their guilt.

Today, many people turn to therapists and analysts for relief rather than to religion. Therapists and analysts would be wise to borrow some of the spiritual tools that have long been sources of comfort for guilt. On the other hand, if the spiritual tools and religious practices had been sufficient, the practice of psychotherapy probably would not have expanded to where it is today. Many people today simply feel that religion is closer to the problem than to the solution. It is probably also true that many patients do not suspect that guilt is the real culprit behind their pain and suffering. They think their suffering is caused by something that therapists are more qualified to deal with, like depression and anxiety. They may not know that guilt often lurks behind and can be a significant cause of anxiety and depression.

Because therapists are secular and because many of the traditional answers from faith-based sources fail to provide relief, they must develop clinical methods to treat guilt. While therapists of many different persuasions can be helpful in this work, so can gifted religious professionals, friends, and spiritual groups, like twelve-step groups, if they assist without judging the sins or the sinners.

Psychological Approaches . . .

This article is an excerpt from Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way by Lawrence H. Staples. Dr. Staples has a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity. He is a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, and also holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard. In addition to Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, Lawrence is author of the popular book The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness. He is also the co-author, along with Nancy Carter Pennington, of the just published The Guilt Cure which advances a new theory on guilt.

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• society’s current disdain for heroes and the hero archetype; 
• Trickster’s need for mirroring and its implications regarding the narcissistic nature of contemporary culture; 
• the Trickster’s role in psychotherapy in terms of truth, reliability, and grounding; 
• the relationship between Trickster and the feminine, and the concomitant emergence of feminine values and voices of wisdom; and 
• feminine influences on the philosophy of ethics as well as current attitudes toward evil, violence, and sex. 

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Fisher King Press Presents

Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey

by Mark Winborn

Deep Blues explores the archetypal journey of the human psyche through an examination of the blues as a musical genre. The genesis, history, and thematic patterns of the blues are examined from an archetypal perspective and various analytic theories – especially the interaction between Erich Neumann’s concept of unitary reality and the blues experience. Mythological and shamanistic parallels are used to provide a deeper understanding of the role of the bluesman, the blues performance, and the innate healing potential of the music. Universal aspects of human experience and transcendence are revealed through the creative medium of the blues. The atmosphere of Deep Blues is enhanced by the black and white photographs of Tom Smith which capture striking blues performances in the Maxwell Street section of Chicago. Jungian analysts, therapists and psychoanalytic practitioners with an interest in the interaction between creative expression and human experience should find Deep Blues a worthy contribution. Deep Blues also appeals to ethnomusicologists and enthusiasts of all forms of music.

In his ever-fascinating book, Dr. Mark Winborn goes where few authors on the blues have ever gone: into the profoundly psychological implications of the genre. A Jungian by training, Winborn argues convincingly how the blues communicates for reasons that extend to the symbolic language of the unconscious. His results are sure to inspire future research in not just the blues but in other areas of traditional culture and the creative act. 
—Dr. William L. Ellis, Saint Michael’s College, Colchester, Vermont Ethnomusicologist - Musician - Music Critic

Just like a fine bluesman, Winborn ‘riffs’ on the various psychological aspects of his topic: the genesis of the sound, the unitary reality created in playing and listening to the blues, its archetypal manifestations and healing potential, and the influence of the personality of performer and performance. As he states, ‘the blues belongs among the great arts because of its extraordinary capacity to embrace, embody, and transcend the opposites, especially as they become manifest in the experience of tragedy and suffering.’ Using original lyrics throughout, Winborn invites us to reimagine the power of the blues in its ability to deepen our own soulfulness. 
—August J. Cwik, Psy.D., Jungian Analyst & Musician

Mark Winborn, PhD, NCPsyA is a Jungian Psychoanalyst and Clinical Psychologist. He is a training and supervising analyst of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. Dr. Winborn maintains a private practice in Memphis, Tennessee where he is also currently the Training Coordinator for the Memphis Jungian Seminar.

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The Guilt Cure

by Nancy Carter Pennington and Lawrence H. Staples

The Guilt Cure addresses spiritual and psychological means to discover, treat, and expiate guilt and it’s neurotic counterparts. One of the great paradoxes of guilt is that despite its useful contributions to our lives, it can also be potentially dangerous. It is a major cause of anxiety and depression, and if untreated or expiated in some way, guilt has the potential to cause premature death by bringing on an onslaught of physical ailments--and suicide.

The Guilt Cure reaches deep into humanity’s collective experience of guilt and finds persuasive psychological reasons for guilt’s role and purpose that go far beyond conventionally held religious explanations. The conventional view is that guilt’s primary function is the protection and maintenance of morals. While guilt admittedly contributes to the protection and maintenance of morals, this is by no means its only role. Nor is it even its most important role.

Guilt is far more morally neutral than many would suspect. While guilt is conventionally thought to be a result of sin, most guilt, in fact, stems from thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that violate no religious or divine ordinances. The psychological experience of guilt is much broader than the religious definition of sin would account for. The Guilt Cure examines the many faces of guilt, including its more important function in the creation and maintenance of consciousness, its place in the self-regulatory system of the psyche, its effects on our psychological development, and its impact on our mental health and wellbeing.

About the Authors

Nancy Carter Pennington received her MSW from The University of Maryland. For more than 30 years, Nancy has had the privilege of working with clients on a range of issues: phobias, OCD, grief, depression, obsessive thinking, guilt, and relationships.

Lawrence H. Staples is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Washington, DC. Dr. Staples has an MBA from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity. He is the author of Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

Product Details

Hardcover, Paperback & eBook editions

150 pages, Index, Bibliography.

Publisher: Fisher King Press

1st edition (Sept 21, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1926715535
ISBN-13: 978-1926715537

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Eros and the Shattering Gaze: Transcending Narcissism by Kenneth A. Kimmel 

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Benjamin Shiff's painting Life  on the cover of The Cycle of Life

A primary tenet of my perspective on the journey through life, as I describe in the newly published The Cycle of Life, pertains to the confluence of fate and destiny, and how conscious choice and the unexpected turns of the tide flow together. How do predetermined fate and individual destiny cohabit in one’s life, how does fate determine one’s prospects, and in what ways can the individual determine the course of his or her possibilities? Everything is foreseen, and everything is laid bare, yet everything is in accordance with the will of man, says the Talmud. Likewise, as Jung observed, something that remains unconscious in the individual psyche, may become manifest as external fate. Sometimes, what has powerfully constellated in one’s psyche, yet remains below the level of consciousness, may materialize in physical reality.

Little did I anticipate that this would become apparent in my search for a cover image, the face of the book. I traveled along rivers of time and traversed cultural continents, ending up, so it seemed, with a coverless book in my hands. Then, in a sudden bliss, I remembered a painter whose name was at the tip of my tongue. As I extracted his name, Benjamin Shiff, from the layers of my memory, I was reminded of the balance between lyric harmony and pensive concern, which characterized the dream-like painting I recalled.

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Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut

—John Beebe, Jungian analyst, author of Integrity in Depth

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pietro_lorenzetti

As once a Virgin fashioned the whole earth,  

So by a Virgin it shall have rebirth.(5)

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Mars Hill Graduate School and Elizabeth Clark Stern present:
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
A Play By Elizabeth Clark Stern

Performance is May 7, 2011 (time and directions below)

The year is 1910. The work of Sigmund Freud, and his heir-apparent, Carl Jung, are transforming the way the world thinks about human nature and the inner recesses of the mind. It is a time of experimentation, expansion, and new frontiers of intellectual power. Into the heart of this world steps a 22 year old woman, a new patient of the now famous analyst, Carl Jung. Toni Wolff brings a new voice into this creative vortex that also includes Jung’s wife, Emma. The three of them form an unconventional triangle where the women compete for the role of Jung’s intellectual muse with more passion than they care about who shares his bed.

Who were these women to each other? We know that both were intellectual, independent, self-educated, at a time when Swiss women did not attend university. They were arguably quite hungry for another woman to talk to about ideas.

The play also explores the nature of Emma’s clandestine correspondence with Sigmund Freud, the separate relationship each woman had with C.G. Jung, and how this informed the women’s connection to each other. The themes of this story are endemic to our modern world: the nature of power, the complexity of relationships, oppression, betrayal, corruption, and redemption.

Saturday, May 7, 2011 Doors open 7:30pm and Curtain at 8pm
Mars Hill Graduate School
$8 Student/$12 General - Pay at the Door
Directions

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ELIZABETH CLARK STERN BIO
Elizabeth Clark-Stern is a psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle, WA. Before embracing this beloved work, she worked as a professional writer and actor. Her produced plays and teleplays include All I Could See From Where I Stood, Help Wanted and Nana Sophia's Oasis. Out of the Shadows began as an independent study at Antioch University. Revised some years later, the International Association of Analytical Psychologists invited the original production to be performed at the International Jungian Congress in South Africa in 2007.

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Benefit for The C. G. Jung Society of New Orleans
"Out of the Shadows: A Story of Toni Wolff and Emma Jung"
Produced by The Archetypal Theater Company
Friday, May 20, 2011
7:30 pm
Tickets: $35 per person
$60 per couple
$100 for 4
For Locations and Reservations,
contact 985-892-1534 or romeroce4@aol.com

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Join us for an evening that includes the Southern premiere of Elizabeth Clark-Stern's play, "Out of the Shadows: A Story of Toni Wolff and Emma Jung," presented by the Jung Society and produced by The Archetypal Theater Company. The play opens in 1910, as Sigmund Freud and his heir-apparent, Carl Jung, are changing the way we think about the mind and human nature. Jung's 26-year-old wife, Emma, a mother of four, aspires to help her husband develop the new science of psychology, but when 22-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. Toni and Emma's rivalry for Jung's heart and mind is passionate, yet, with the doors to the university barred to women of the Swiss aristocracy, they also find shared experience. 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. "Out of the Shadows" follows Toni and Emma's relationship over forty years while charting the parallel course of the field of psychology and some of its major players.

For locations and reservations, contact 985-892-1534 or romeroce4@aol.com.

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So many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my Mother’s stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother's stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories–like her life–must be recorded. –ALICE WALKER[1]

Being a mother is an experience of body and soul which ties one to the source of our life and all life. The Motherline is for women who have mothers, are mothers, or are considering becoming mothers, and for the men who love them. Telling the stories of women whose maturation has been experienced in the cycle of mothering, this book does not sever mother from daughter, feminism from "the feminine," body from psyche. The path to wholeness requires reclaiming aspects of the feminine self that we have lost and forgotten in our struggle to free ourselves from constricting roles; it requires that a woman make a journey to find her roots in the personal, cultural, and archetypal Motherline.


Mother is the first world we know, the source of our lives and our stories. Embodying the mystery of origin, she connects us to the great web of kin and generation. Yet the voice of her experience is seldom heard in our literature. Psychology, the field that examines human nature, has tended to be child-oriented. And much of the feminist literature has been daughter-identified. We are so full of judgments about what mother ought to be that we can barely see what mother is. This has been shattering to a woman's sense of self and her connection to roots. We have no cultural mirror in which to envision the fullness of female development; we are deprived of images of female wisdom and maturity. Finding our female roots, reclaiming our feminine souls, requires paying attention to our real mothers' lives and experience; listening to our mothers' stories, and our grandmothers' stories, is the beginning of understanding our own. When we hear these stories, we tap into the wisdom of our Motherline.

Being a mother is an experience of body and soul that ties one to the source of one's own life and to all life. In the deepest sense of the word it is a religious experience, for the word religion comes from the Latin religare, which means to bind back to, to reconnect with. The Motherline will help you reconnect to the story of your origins, your Motherline, your body, and your soul.

I have been gathering material for this book all of my life, much like one gathers material for a patchwork quilt. I've taken the stories of the women of my Motherline, memories of childhood, journal entries, my experience raising children and stepchildren to adulthood, pieces of my master's and doctoral dissertations[2] (both of them studies of mothers), the stories I've heard as a psychotherapist and the stories I've told as an analysand, what I've learned from students and colleagues at the Women's Therapy Center and the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and what I've learned at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco where I trained as a Jungian analyst. I've gathered dreams and poetry and prose, and sewed them all together with journeys I have made to create a pattern that evokes female wholeness. Like most women's sewing projects, it has been worked on, put away while children are being raised and life makes other demands, felt guilty about, and brought back out to be worked on again. As in quilting, the design of the book has been created by combining many separate elements into one pattern.

Although The Motherline contains the voices of many women, its structure is based on my personal life because it is the flesh and blood of our female, subjective experience that I seek to bring to consciousness. Each of our stories is unique and yet there is an underlying Motherline pattern. Other women's stories set up sympathetic vibrations so that we can begin to near our own.

The process of finding one's Motherline is idiosyncratic and chaotic. It takes most of a lifetime. Every woman must engage in it in her own way and in her own time. The reclamation of feminine soul is not a process that can be readily taught. Rather it is a potentiality that can be evoked by shifting the way we listen to women's voices, and the way we see ourselves, our mothers, and our grandmothers. I hope to facilitate this process.

Each chapter of the book describes reclaiming an aspect of the feminine self. It is not the entire story. There are aspects of female nature, such as the warrior-amazon and the erotic lover, that are not addressed here. The Motherline is a search for female continuity and the sense of wholeness that is gained when we find it.


OF SELF, SOUL, AND SHADOW

What is self and soul? Self has come to have specific meanings in psychology. In self psychology, it is used to mean an inborn potentiality for an authentic and vital identity. Jungians use the word self in a similar but larger sense. For them, the self is the "potential for integration of the total personality"; it "contains the seeds of the individual's destiny";[3] it includes the psychological, biological, and spiritual aspects of being human.

There has been much controversy among feminist thinkers about whether the experience of self is gender-specific. There are those who argue that a gendered sense of self is a by-product of culture. Though I agree that the culture may warp and damage the female experience of self, it makes no sense to me to separate one's sense of self entirely from one's body. Female identity is rooted in embodied experiences of menstruation, childbearing, lactation, and menopause, which are filtered through the veils that different cultures throw over them. Clearly a woman's identity consists of much more than her reproductive system, and this is where the feminist critique is invaluable in confronting cultural misogyny. But I believe that we go to the depths of our feminine selves in these primal, physical experiences, common to women of all cultures. Devaluing these depths is a function of our own cultural bias.

The word soul is most commonly used in a religious context, and means the part of our being that is connected to the immortal. Some psychological thinkers such as James Hillman use soul in a broader way, to name the experience of seeing the gods or the sacred in all life forms. This book is about women's immortality through our birth-giving capacity. Soul here is not separate from body. It is through our full honoring of bodily experience that we become ensouled. Soul does not separate us from ordinary life. It does not float off into the stratosphere as spirit seems to in the distinction commonly made between spirit and flesh. In colloquial usage one who has soul is one who has acquired depth through suffering, often one who has been oppressed. Soul is born of the kind of suffering that brings us in touch with the mysteries of life.

One way we garner soul is through the integration of what Jungians call the shadow. The shadow is that part of our personality that is cast into darkness by our fears, values, temperament, and cultural prejudice–a part of ourselves we do not know. Traits that we deny and repress in ourselves and dislike intensely in others are usually parts of our shadow. Contemporary women are prone to project aspects of their shadows on their mothers. We cut off our natural energy flow when we disown our envy, rage, competitiveness, pettiness, sensuality. Paradoxically, when these traits are recognized and owned, they tend to soften and get humanized. Learning to suffer our own shortcomings and those of others, even to develop a sense of humor about it all, gives depth and richness to the personality. It is an aspect of maturation and of soul.

Jungian theory describes psychological experience on three levels: the personal, the cultural, and the archetypal. Most current psychology emphasizes the personal and neglects the cultural (leaving that to the anthropologists) and the archetypal (leaving that to the theologians). The problems created by this narrowness in psychological thought are more than academic. Mothers get saddled with cultural baggage or with archetypal expectations. Because the gods are dead, mothers are expected to stand in for them, taking the blame for much that more truly belongs to fate. Because we've lost a historical sense of how culture shifts, we are outraged that our mothers did not raise us according to the standards of our times but had the effrontery to be shaped by the values of their own generation. Thus painful intergenerational rifts and misunderstandings arise. Women whose mothers love them deeply feel estranged and unmothered. Women whose daughters long to know them can find no language of mutuality.


OUR MAMMALIAN MAMA

How do we distinguish between the three levels of experience–personal, cultural, and archetypal? Archetypal psychologist James Hillman sees Archetypes as the "roots of the soul."[4] Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson describes the archetype as involving both a primordial image and an instinctual root that "create a pervasive sense of being gripped by an urge and dazzled by an image of compelling power."[5] An archetype can be described as an underlying life pattern with both instinctive and symbolic poles of expression surrounding a core of great emotional charge. The Great Mother archetype, for example, is a primordial image that expresses our instinctual, mammalian nature. It takes many cultural forms, from images of the Virgin Mary to those of the death-dealing goddess, Kali, in India. But the female form with breasts is recognizable in all cultures. We are all born of woman. Her breasts and her womb permeate all times and all cultures. Every culture translates the mother archetype differently, and every biological, or personal, mother has her own unique psychology and connection to her child.

The personal experience of the mother-daughter relationship is shaped by the individual lives and temperaments of the two women. If, for example, the daughter is the longed-for only child of an older mother who tried for years to get pregnant, her experience of her personal mother will be very different from that of the sixth child of an exhausted mother who considered getting an abortion. The quiet, introverted child of a quiet, introverted mother will have a different experience of self than would the fiery, extroverted child of that same introverted mother. When a woman becomes a mother she embodies the archetypal mother and becomes the culture bearer who will socialize the child. At the cultural level a child will be schedule or demand fed, bottle or breast fed, told she should be seen but not heard, or encouraged to express her spontaneity, raised by her mother or a nanny or an au pair depending on the culture, historical period, class, and personal circumstances into which she is born. However, all these children need to be held and protected, praised and fed and played with, scolded and limited. Though this is done differently in various cultures, a child needs some manifestation of the mother archetype in her life or she will be severely damaged.

It is confusing to sort out the personal, cultural, and archetypal levels of our experience. Archetypes are mostly seen in their cultural manifestation, and changes in cultural attitude become personal battlegrounds between generations. But there are some areas in which the archetype shines through. For example, it is striking to consider how many cultures make similar sounds for naming the mother: Mama, Mutti, Ama, Ema. The "ma" sound brings the lips together as in reaching for the breast. Thus a linguistic form reveals the physiological nature of the archetype across cultures.

I remember seeing a television report about a gorilla mother who had just given birth in a local zoo. She held her baby close. When she lifted her great gorilla hand to tenderly pat its head, a shiver of archetypal energy burst through me. I knew that gesture. Every human being knows that gesture. The mother archetype in her gorilla form had been revealed to me on the evening news!

The words male and female refer to our biological natures, while the words masculine and feminine imply cultural and archetypal meanings as well. Jungians historically have been interested in the archetypal distinctions between the masculine and the feminine, not limiting them to one gender. Whether these concepts are useful or stereotypical has been controversial in both Jungian and feminist circles. The feminist critique is that these are culturally biased concepts. Jungians respond by pointing out that the masculine is not limited to men, or the feminine to women.

The terms masculine and feminine are vital concepts that are typically truncated by the tendency of cultures to make rigid gender distinctions. These hurt both men and women. There is an enormous overlap in what men and women can do. At all levels, including the physical, we are more alike than we are different. But we can rob ourselves of our deep instinctual roots in life if we deny the power of the differences between the sexes. The feminine experienced by a woman is very different from the feminine experienced by a man, and vice versa. Gender differences have biological roots that go far below the cultural level, below human history: they precede our evolution as a species and take us down to our mammalian beginnings.

All mammals are divided into males and females. Females have breasts and wombs. Males have testes and penises. These sexual differences are meaningful; far from being a curse or a limitation on women's lives, our mammalian experience is what grounds us in our feminine selves. My thinking resonates with that of the men's movement, of which poet Robert Bly is a central spokesperson. He and others argue for a recognition of the differences between men and women at the instinctual level. It is a relief and a pleasure to hear men honoring their own embodied experience. These differences are, indeed, empowering for both men and women.


A PATTERN OF FEMININE SOUL

The Motherline is arranged in ten chapters, each evoking an aspect of the feminine self and how it can be reclaimed. The sequence describes the journey I made, but it is not a linear path. One could begin from any place in the pattern to find one's way into the Motherline.

We begin with a conceptualization of the Motherline as the source of our stories. In the second chapter we consider the women's movement, which at once frees us and gets in our way as we seek our female roots. In the third chapter we pick up the thread of our Motherline search by going back to our forgotten knowledge of the mother tongue, remembering images we took in with our mother's milk, of the primal female experiences of bearing, bonding, and being in relation to children.

In Chapter 4, we confront the developmental problem of differentiation between mother and daughter, which forces both women to engage in the painful process of sorting out self from other, and acknowledging shadow. The thread of our story is taken up in Chapter 5 by four women who, in telling their stories from the middle of their lives, loop from the past through the present to the future and back, weaving a rich tapestry of contemporary female maturity.

In Chapter 6 we follow the thread of women's lives by looking at generational change and how we are shaped by the times we live in. Chapter 7 explores girlhood memories of a grandmother and how this process links a woman to her past and to her future and transforms the mother-daughter dyad into the ancient, sacred, female trinity: maiden, mother, and crone.

Throughout The Motherline, my own Motherline story unfolds; I am confronted by the ghost of the grandmother I never knew. Her voice comes to me from before my birth and requires me to make a journey into the realm of my ancestors. This takes me to Israel in Chapter 8 to meet female relatives and learn their stories, and to Germany in Chapter 9 to see the landscape of my mother's childhood through the ashes of the Holocaust. My journey is part of a pattern of female development; you will see how many women make this descent into the past to find their roots.

In the end we must seek our spiritual roots in the old female religion. In Chapter 10 we traverse the land from the lost shore temples of the east coast of India to a sacred hill in Glastonbury and discover that the forbidden and taboo aspects of feminine soul are a part of our landscape as well as our dreams and our visions. What we have lost or forgotten of the feminine mysteries is hidden in our everyday lives.

About the Author
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is the author of The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way and The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots 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 (2010), red clay is talking (2000) and crimes of the dreamer (2005).

Naomi has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times and is the recipient of the 2009 Obama Millennium Poetry award for "Madelyn Dunham, Passing On.” Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice, poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives, and a grandmother many times over.

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[1] Alice Walker, In Search of My Mother's Garden (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1983), p. 240.
[2] Naomi Ruth Lowinsky "The Generation Cord: A Hand-Me-Down of Mothering in Four Families and a Changing Culture," (Master's thesis, Lone Mountain College, 1977). "All the Days of Her Life: A Study of Adult Development and the Motherline in Modern Women," (Ph.D. diss., Center for Psychological Studies, 1985).
[3] Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 91.
[4] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), p. xiii.
[5] Joseph Henderson, Shadow and Self (Wilmette, Ill: Chiron, 1990), P. 54.

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Following is an impressive and rich example of the power of this technique to affect and even shape our lives. It's an active imagination done by a man in his late thirties. He was an extremely successful salesman who was, nevertheless, unhappy with his work and life. Despite his high income, work had lost its meaning for him. He had entered Jungian analysis in order to help him out of his suffocating existence and find a new and different way. He had a powerful dream that he took to his analyst. His analyst suggested he do active imagination with one of the figures in the dream. His is a beautiful example of active imagination that led to much more than a dialogue. It became the seed of a creative life that grew and flourished into a wholly new career. Out of his active imagination came a novel, LeRoi, which was then followed by two other novels, SamSara and Menopause Man. All have been published as the The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul series. He is living today as a successful writer. He has written still more books that are waiting in the wings to be published. His name is Mel Mathews. The power of the active imagination is seen in the fact that it unearthed in him some deep hidden spring of creativity that suddenly gushed forth. Apparently, he had been living a life of suspended animation that lay there until some psychic prince awoke it.

Mel's book LeRoi was literally born from a dream and the active imagination he did with the dream. He had the following dream: A woman was sitting in a diner, in a booth smoking. " Excuse me, I wonder if you could put your cigarette out?" I asked. She ignored me. A few minutes later she lit up again. I stood up, walked around to her booth, grabbed her pack of smokes and the ashtray and walked out the front door. I dumped the ashtray and stepped on her lit smoke; then, I dropped her pack and stomped them as well. I walked back inside, slammed the empty ashtray down on the coffee counter and sat down. A petite pony-tailed brunette walked up with the iced tea pitcher to refill my glass. "Can I have some more ice please?" " Sure", she answered, " I'm sure (Flo) the boss-lady will be out in a minute", the brunette said, as she turned around with my ice. "What does she want?" " You'll have to ask her yourself."

Mel discussed the dream with his analyst who suggested a dialogue with the boss-lady.

While the creative process is different for each individual, one can sometimes discern similarities. The seed that unleashed Mel's creative process was a dream and a few sentences associated with the dream. His process bears some resemblance to the process by which Isak Dineson created her work.

Isak Dineson, a Danish novelist, had quite a reputation as a storyteller, and following dinner her guests usually asked her to tell a story. She complied, but stipulated that her guests must supply her with the opening sentence. Using this sentence as her starting point, she would then spin tales that were hours long.

She had a way of forming and telling stories that is, perhaps, a microcosmic example of the macrocosmic processes of all creation. I could see that, like a verdant and luxurious garden, all creation must first be seeded before it can produce a crop. In Dineson's case, the opening sentence given by the guest was the impregnating seed that she took into her imagination to create the story, like an acorn taken into the earth creates a tree. She began with a word (her acorn) that unfolded from itself a string of words connected to each other by some associative bond that produced a coherent creation. It is as if the opening sentence contained all the genetic codes that knew from the beginning where they were going and how they would get there. The mother is not conscious of the code; it operates invisibly and unconsciously once the seed is fertilized. The mystery is that such a simple, tiny seed can produce such a large and complicated product. It is as if the story develops in accordance with its own processes once the seed is planted in fertile soil. The tale was the crop that grew out of the seed. A mundane analogy to this process is the unwinding of a spool of yarn. The key is to find the tiny end, and then with that small piece in our hand we pull and find that attached to it is a long string that yields the totality of the yarn. We often refer to tales and stories as yarns.

Psychologists are familiar with these processes that are triggered by a single word, suggestion, or thought and that can appear in the verbal outpourings of their patients. They notice that words that belong together are part of an unconscious chain or string that is formed by a process that they called "association". Jung's work on his Association Experiments demonstrates the power of a word to stimulate the unconscious to produce other words that are meaningfully connected by association. Freud pioneered the use of "free association" to bring to consciousness a patient's unconscious complexes. In "free association" all the words that belong together in that string are revealed just as all the yarn is revealed when the spool is spun and then unrolled.

A book like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is written in the style of free association, where words with an associative connection appear as if they were spilled upon the page. Some people read it and see it as meaningless or, at best, as loosely connected gibberish. Others experience it as great literature. The Nobel Prize Committee apparently agreed with the latter. James Joyce's Ulysses and many other books have had similar mixed receptions. Some point to Jackson Pollock's process of painting as equivalent to Faulkner's writing, but in the case of Pollock it is drops of paint rather than words that are spilled. The works of both artists contain thousands of fragments (words or specks of paint) that have an associative coherence. In a sense, a novel is a big yarn, a long string that contains the bits and pieces that through association are attached to and belong with each other. If we think about it, we may suspect that there is some kind of "unconscious knowingness" behind this creative process. We can also suspect there is some kind of word (or note, or color or form) magnet in our psyche that draws to itself and coheres words, notes and colors that previously existed in isolation but, eventually, belong together.

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Consider the current fascination with Superheroes in the age of CGI and comic book cinema. Just last night I watched Christopher Nolan’s record-shattering The Dark Knight, which takes as its thesis the complicated interrelationship of the hero and the shadow. Given the death of Heath Ledger, who played the Joker, the notions of the Hero are expanded to the realm of the Artist and his or her relationship with Pain.

When Shalit writes, on p. 95, “…life thrives in the shadow; in our detested weaknesses, complex inferiorities and repressed instincts there is more life and inspiration than in the well-adjusted compliance of the persona,” I think that his words bring Ledger’s death into sharp relief. As an acting teacher who works almost exclusively with teens, many of which see Ledger’s “dying for his art” as a form of heroism (an interpretation with which I disagree; it discounts the necessity of craft in preventing such tragedies), I think it is more important than ever to examine carefully the Hero’s role and relationship to the shadow.

The shadow is Jung’s term for the unconscious, the “thing a person has no wish to be” (p. ix). His early experience of his own shadow is, to me, some of the most compelling and useful text in his Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.

The hero must go into the shadow (the forest, the depth of the sea, the desert, the cave­—Plato’s or the Celtic Bard’s) to retrieve his soul. The shadow is a place of misery, calling to mind Schopenhauer’s ideas about life being mostly pain and sorrow and Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss” [sat chit ananda].

Much of what Shalit centers on as aspects of the Hero are present in the shaman, who also has “one foot in divinity, one in the world of mortals” (p. 33). The journey into the netherworld (often to retrieve or heal the soul), the returning with precious gifts of knowledge, the responsibility of re-integration into the community (see Mircea Eliade’s comprehensive works on shamanism), all parallel the hero’s journey. The modes of the vision quest and the alchemical transformation are, further, symbolically manifested in the landscape of the fairy tale.

Pursuing this idea, Shalit, in the tradition of Robert Bly’s Iron John or Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment, ably presents and dissects a number of fairy tales, myths, and Biblical stories in the course of the book.

“Nixie of the Millpond” is presented without commentary. The myth of Perseus, however, is told with commentary from a wide variety of sources mixed in. It would be valuable to watch Clash of the Titans (1981) after reading this section, as it brings Shalit’s analysis visually to life. Page 47 lists eight traits of the hero myth to guide the interpretation. I would add a ninth—the use of magical items (such as Athena’s shield, Hermes’ sword, and the three gifts of the Stygian nymphs, all of which are given to Perseus to defeat the Medusa).

I have used these same basic elements of the hero myth for the past decade in my theatre workshops with youth and in my books on using drama in the classroom.

If our youth are to break the limiting conventions of societal and governmental structures that have put the planet and its inhabitants in a place of crisis, they—and those who guide and educate them—must understand the Hero and Shadow both.

On p. 65 Shalit writes, “Collective consciousness constitutes a threat by its demand on compliance with rules, roles and regulations.” The mythological fighting of dragons and monsters by the Hero is most clearly articulated to me by Joseph Campbell, when, in various books and interviews, he talked about Nietzsche describing the cycle of life as beginning as a camel loaded down with the requirements of parents and society. The camel then goes into the desert (one of the hero landscapes I mentioned earlier) to become the lion, who must slay the dragon whose scales all say "Thou Shalt." This dragonslaying, certainly a noble and necessary undertaking, situates the Hero as the classic warrior, akin to Michael the Archangel and St. George, but when the fighting is done, the warrior must put down the sword. Whether we speak of the Vulcans comprising the Bush administration (as author James Mann terms them) or an abused child who grows up to wage ongoing battles even on a landscape of peace in a more stable family situation, this is a notion well worth focusing on. I think of the Roman general Cincinnatus, who moved back and forth between sword and plow and the dwarves of the novels of Dan Parkinson, who switch the hammer from one hand to the other as necessary in times of peace and war.

The hero struggling with the shadow often projects onto a demonized Other because, as Shalit reminds us, “Since shadows easily lend themselves to projection [see pgs. 97–101 for the three types identified by Jung], they are discovered so much more easily in the other than oneself” (p. 84). This is, of course, the source of most of the ugliness in the history of Humankind.

The Biblical explorations/interpretations presented are a high point of the book (see, for example, p. 63 on the Virgin Mary) and begin in earnest with the section on the shadow. The etymology of both biblical and mythological names given throughout add much to the discussion.

Shalit uses Oscar Wilde’s “doppelganger novel,” Picture of Dorian Gray, to explore the notion of shadow in terms of our duality, as Dorian is projecting his shadow onto the canvas. Duality—war/peace, animus/anima, masculine/feminine, dark/light—is prevalent throughout the book.

The second half of the book deals with the Enemy, Cripple, and Beggar of the title. The Enemy (the projection onto the Other that is really the shadow in oneself) is explored through such Biblical figures as Amalek, Samson, Jacob, and the key figures in the trial of Jesus. The section on the Fathers and the Collective Consciousness, dealing with Caiaphas, the Sanhedrin, Barabbas, and Judas, is fascinating reading. The connection of the father and the son resounds on many levels, including the relationship of Jesus/Judas as being nearly inseparable.

The Cripple (one’s weaknesses and inner wounds) is explored through mythological/fictional figures such as Hephaestus, Ptah, Oedipus, Quasimodo, and the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Cripple.” There are case studies here that serve many of the same functions as the analyses of the myths and fairy tales, and will appeal to those interested in the dynamics of Jungian analysis. Certain aspects of the second case study reminded me of Don Juan DeMarco (1995), the film starring Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp, especially considering that love (Eros) is the means to heal the Cripple, as articulated so well in this book.

The final section deals with the Beggar (the “door that leads to the passageway of the Self,” p. 225), which is the Inner Voice or Daemon. Shalit deals here with the notions of alchemy that so fascinated Jung. I was intrigued by the story of King Solomon as the wandering beggar and Shalit’s exploration of the life of the prophet Elijah.

In closing, I want to mention the cover art, a painting titled “Emerging” by Susan Bostrom-Wong, an artist and Jungian analyst. Shalit asks the reader to examine the images embedded in the human figure. It is well worth the time to do so. Like the book itself, the longer you look, the more you will see.

I urge educators, artists, and those in search of new paths toward a life well-lived to buy this book. I know that one of my own heroes, Joseph Campbell, certainly would.

This review of Erel Shalit’s Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path was written by Joey Madia

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Although I owe not a little to philosophy, and have benefited by the rigorous discipline of its methods of thought, I nevertheless feel in its presence that holy dread which is inborn in every observer of facts. (“Foreword to Mehlich, ‘Fichte’s Psychology and Its Relation to the Present,’” CW 18, par. 1730.)

All our knowledge consists of stuff of the psyche—which, because it alone is immediate, is superlatively real. Here, then, is a reality to which the psychologist can appeal—namely psychic reality…Psychic contents are derived from the “material” environment; as when I picture the car I want to buy. Others, no less real, seem to come from a “spiritual” source which appears to be very different from the physical environment, such as wondering about the state of the soul of my dead father. My fear of a ghost is a psychic image just as real to me as my fear of fire. We don’t try to account for our fear of either one by physical arguments, but we experience each of them as real… Unless we accept the reality of the psyche we try to explain our experiences in a way that does violence to many of them—those (experiences) expressed through superstition, religion, and philosophy. Truth that appeals to the testimony of the senses may satisfy reason, but it offers nothing that stirs our feelings and expresses them by giving a meaning to human life. (“Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology,” CW 8, par. 680-686.)

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Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign - Volume I: Aries - Virgo

Volume II: Libra - Pisces

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Animus Aeternus cover image  Lovers’ Promenade © 2009 Iris Sonnenschein www.irisquilts.com

Becoming: An Introduction to Jung’s Concept of Individuation

Touching: Body Therapy and Depth Psychology

Animus Aeternus: Exploring the Inner Masculine

Mercury Rising: Women, Evil and the Trickster Gods

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Animus Aeternus  “The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman’s ancestral experiences of man—and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being.” —C.G. Jung
Inextricably enmeshed in the life of every woman is a constellation of autonomous energy that Jung called animus, her masculine side. As a woman develops psychologically, animus changes, appearing and reappearing as child or adult, lover or enemy, king or slave, animal or spirit. . . read more

Guilt and Gender Roles  A woman needs access to her inner masculine qualities if she is to protect and defend herself against those masculine qualities that have been turned against her. For a woman the cure for being a victim of those masculine qualities is homeopathic, with respect to the man; that is, she gives him a dose of his own medicine . . . read more

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Threshold Experiences - Michael Conforti "In the beginning", so goes many a great story. These familiar words beckon us across a threshold, often transporting us into unknown worlds and novel experiences. So too our lives are filled with many such "beginnings" -- new jobs, relationships, adventures, and even the inception of life itself. Each of these "threshold experiences" not only introduces us to new domains, but also draws us into the realities of archetypal . . . read more

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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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