Madness remains an important concept in the literature of those who been psychiatrized. People who study Jung have a very difficult time with the Red Book. They often react to the fact that Jung, within his own psyche, allowed and embraced what is often labeled psychotic in those less resourced.
During the dialogue, inspired by The Red Book image shown here, Harvey commented on an inborn hatred of our physical selves, saying that humans are in “a boat of meat that is now exploding,” and the struggle we all go through in acknowledging and loving the evil that’s within all of us. … [click on title to read and view more]
I will be using the word trauma to mean any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. For an experience to be “unbearable” means that it overwhelms the usual defensive measures which Freud described as a “protective shield against stimuli.” Trauma of this magnitude varies from the acute, shattering experiences of child abuse so prominent in the literature today to the more “cumulative traumas” of unmet dependency-needs that mount up to devastating effect in some children’s development, including the more acute deprivations of infancy described by Winnicott as “primitive agonies,” the experience of which is “unthinkable.” The distinguishing feature of such trauma is what Heinz Kohut called “disintegration anxiety,” an unnameable dread associated with the threatened dissolution of a coherent self.” …
Motivation to do what we can to become conscious.
"Jung felt that the “unlived lives” of the parents deeply impacted the lives of the children, as if “branding” the children with a particular destiny. The unlived lives of the parents is an ancestral inheritance which has great weight and gravitas, in that it literally shapes the lives of the children. Jung elaborates on the notion of the parents’ unlived lives when he says it is “that part of their lives which might have been lived had not certain somewhat threadbare excuses prevented the parents from doing so. To put it bluntly, it is that part of life which they have always shirked, probably by means of a pious lie. That sows the most virulent germs.” … [click on title for the rest of the post]
This is a fascinating and important and necessarily damning talk. I've been taking a Rumi course as well as a Christ Path course from Andrew Harvey. His life is drenched in the numinous and he's quite a delightful teacher I'm honored to be learning from. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
The following excerpt is the first three paragraphs to the introduction of The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, by Donald Kalsched. I started reading it yesterday. The experience I have reading it is similar to when I read some of the books I experienced as formative in my early adulthood. Being swept up like this is wonderful. Wow! I’ve not happened upon a book like this in a long time. What was even more delicious is that I came upon the book in a highly synchronistic way, in the home of someone for which I’m cat sitting. It felt like it was handed to me at the very moment I needed it. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced. The whole world is sick….and... Continue Reading →
Our culture has trouble dealing with difficult emotions. And the message we often get, implicitly and explicitly is to repress and deny them.
When an individual has been swept up into the world of symbolic mysteries, nothing comes of it; nothing can come of it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has occurred when that individual was in the body…. Only if you first return to your body, to your earth, can individuation take place; only then does the thing... Continue Reading →
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do... Continue Reading →
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