Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology – serie

The black sun, an ages-old image of the darkness in individual lives and in life itself, has not been treated hospitably in the modern world. Modern psychology has seen darkness primarily as a negative force, something to move through and beyond, but it actually has an intrinsic importance to the human psyche. In this book, Jungian analyst Stanton Marlan reexamines the paradoxical image of the black sun and the meaning of darkness in Western culture.In the image of the black sun, Marlan finds the hint of a darkness that shines. He draws upon his clinical experiences and on a wide range of literature and art to explore the influence of light and shadow on the fundamental structures of modern thought as well as the contemporary practice of analysis.An important contribution to the understanding of alchemical psychology, this book draws on a postmodern sensibility to offer insight into modernity, the act of imagination, and the work of analysis in understanding depression, trauma, and transformation of the soul.

Over the centuries the western mind has come to an uncritical certainty that reality has two dimensions - one ""out there"" and another ""here inside"". Roberto Gambini believes that we are now entering an age in which what has been perceived as duality is now being revealed as one with two sides.

Emotion is an expression of the self, Verena Kast writes in this study of the neglected emotions of joy, inspiration, and hope. ""If we decide we no longer want to hide behind empty shells, then we will have to allow certain emotions more room. We will have to let ourselves laugh louder, cry louder, and shout for joy."" Kast makes the case that not only therapists and analysts but also individuals seeking growth in their own lives should give more attention to the elated emotions. Fear of excess (mania) and analytic preoccupation with grief, anxiety, and depression have together caused joy and hope to be shunned as a focus in individuation (the process toward wholeness). Joy answers the human need for elated feeling and meaning in our lives, a need that is often filled in modern society by secularized parodies of religious ecstasy, such as addiction and compulsiveness. Kast suggests simple techniques for recapturing our joy through development of an autobiography of joy. Using this approach, we can discover what gives us joy personally, how we can best experience joy, and how and why we choke off our joy. By viewing joy, inspiration, and hope as core emotions in our being, we open

Hands are our creative contact point with the world. To Jungian analyst Sonoko Toyoda, they represent feminine spirituality and offer a way to achieve wholeness, in women and men alike. But in the contemporary world, many women have lost the wisdom their hands represent and now must recover the memory of them. Through a traditional story told by the Grimm brothers and similar folk tales from around the world, Toyoda explores the ancient meaning of a woman's hands and the wound of losing them. In the details of these stories she finds common threats to feminine independence and creativity and hopeful clues for how these qualities can be regained. She considers, as well, cultural variations in the tales and how the tasks of spiritual wholeness differ for women in Japan and the West. Turning to the biographies of two prominent women artists-Frida Kahlo and Camille Claudel-she discovers similar themes played out in two historical lives. In these women's relationships with their fathers, brothers, and lovers, she considers further the sources of spiritual wounding. In both paintings and sculptures, Toyoda examines what feminine creativity is. For today's world, the cult of the Black Virgin in Europe and that of the Senju Kannon (bodhisattva) in Japan represent remnants of feminine spirituality. Toyoda looks at these to discover universality before considering through stories of her own analysands how clinical work can help individuals claim their own feminine spirituality. Through her sensitive, insightful, and creative book, Toyoda evokes the memory of women's lost hands to help recover them.

A measure of our need for integrity, John Beebe writes, is that ""we rarely allow ourselves an examination of the concept itself. To do so would betray an unspoken philosophic, poetic, and psychological rule of our culture: not to disturb the mystery of what we desire most."" In this book, Beebe reveals much about the nature of integrity while honoring its central mystery. Beebe traces the evolution of the concept from a moral and theological notion to a psychological one. He explores the Eastern understanding of integrity, as well, basing his discussion on pre-Confucian manuscripts of the Tao Te Ching. Viewing anxiety and shame as functions of integrity, he shows the contributions depth psychology can make to integrity's development. He also looks at the ways sex difference and our resulting notions of gender have colored our culture's experience and expression of integrity. Drawing on his own years of experience as a psychotherapist, Beebe shows how the holding environment of psychotherapy can use delight and rage, and dreams and transference to reveal and foster individual integrity. ""Integrity in Depth"" is a groundbreaking work that moves the reader to think in a new way about the psychological basis of moral wholeness.

The Old Woman's Daughter offers men and women alike a way to make sense of their lives and find more healing alternatives than offered by our present culture. In gentle, evocative imagery, Jungian analyst Claire Douglas invites readers to reconnect with the ancient tradition of the feminine, the ""Old Woman,"" symbolized by her own Celtic grandmother. After considering the dangers to individuals and the society of the masculine-focused dualities of our own culture, Douglas describes an alternative that incorporates the feminine self within each of us, man or woman. Douglas draws on myth and story, her own experiences, poetry, the dreams of some of her patients, and images available from Tibetan Buddhism to find archetypes that help us recognize our inheritance from the Old Woman. She describes a form of therapy that emphasizes ""cherishment,"" or bonding for the purpose of recovering our ties to the ancient feminine, and she deftly incorporates her search for her own voice in shaping the book into an organic whole. Rising from Douglas's lifelong interest in the psychology of the feminine, this book shows how healing is related naturally to a Motherline of attunement, connection, and cherishment.

Child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Astrid Berg states in her introduction that “South Africa is a microcosm.” It is a modern nation, yet many of its inhabitants follow ancient traditions. It is a nation with a colonial past marked by periods of violence, yet it has managed to make a largely peaceful transition to majority rule. It is a nation with eleven official languages embracing a great diversity of cultures and customs, and yet it is also a land where public debate is vigorous, free, and ongoing. In short, South Africa is a place where connections are being built and maintained—both those among people with long kinship and common culture, and those that reach across historical, racial, and class divides. “The western world is undeniably more advanced in certain areas of science and economic development,” Berg states, “but in other areas it seems to lag behind and could learn from” places like South Africa.In her work with children and infants, Berg has become instrumental in building connections with and among her fellow South Africans of all ethnicities. Based upon Berg’s 2010 Fay Lectures in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M University, Connecting with South Africa: Cultural Communication and Understanding is both a self-reflective, subjective account and a scientific discourse on human development and intercultural communication. This volume will be warmly welcomed not only by psychoanalysts and those interested in Jungian thought and practice but also by anyone seeking more effective ways to learn from other cultures. Connecting with South Africa provides sensitive direction for those wishing to find healing and connection in a fractured society.

Growing up, we typically spend more time with our brothers and sisters than we do with our parents. In an age of divorce, mobility, and alienation, the sibling bond is often the only one that really lasts.Given that brothers and sisters are such a fundamental aspect of human existence, it is remarkable that they have received so little in-depth attention in the field of psychology.Henry Abramovitch’s Brothers and Sisters explores the tension between the myth and reality of brothers and sisters in a variety of cultures and through the poignant brother-sister stories in the Bible. Abramovitch looks at the developmental sequence in the sibling relationship as brothers or sisters struggle to find their place with each other, concluding with a very personal account of his own relationship with his brother and sister.

While C. G. Jung had a natural intuitive understanding of the transference and countertransference, his lack of a "coherent method and clinical technique for working with transference and his ambivalence and mercurial attitude to matters of method," have, in the words of therapist and Jungian scholar Jan Wiener, sometimes left Jungians who are eager to hone their knowledge and skills in this area "floundering and confused."Her aim in this important book is to lay the groundwork for the development of a "more contemporary Jungian approach" to working with transference and countertransference dynamics within the therapeutic relationship. Her work is also informed by knowledge from other fields, such as philosophy, infant development, neuroscience, and the arts.In The Therapeutic Relationship, Wiener makes a central distinction between working "in" the transference and working "with" the transference, advocating a flexible approach that takes account of the different kinds of attachment patients can make to their therapists. She develops her own concept of the transference matrix, a model that honors one of Jung’s core beliefs in the development of a symbolic capacity as an essential task of psychotherapy, but at the same time acknowledges that a capacity to symbolize can only emerge through relationship.

The symbol of the heart is at the core of traditional Chinese psychology and culture, according to author Heyong Shen. In this latest volume arising from the popular Fay Lecture Series, sponsored by the Jung Center, Houston, the noted Chinese analyst, scholar, and educator discusses Jungian analysis in China and explores what the historical Chinese emphasis on the heart can add to Western understandings of modern depth psychology.C. G. Jung had a profound personal interest in Chinese culture and wrote extensively on Chinese philosophy and symbolism. In his foreword to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle and book of wisdom, Jung referred to Chinese logograms as readable archetypes.Continuing this theme, Shen states in his prologue, “Most of the basic psychological terms in Chinese characters are formed originally with the image of the heart and contain deep meaning for the understanding of depth psychology and Jungian analysis . . . The Chinese characters for ‘thinking,’ ‘emotion,’ ‘will,’ and ‘intention’ are all combined with the image of the heart, as are the characters for ‘love,’ ‘hate,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘listening,’ ‘healing,’ and for ‘wise,’ ‘wisdom,’ and ‘enlightenment.’” The heart serves as the foundation.Drawing from centuries-deep wells of Chinese, Buddhist, and Confucian thought as well as an intimate understanding of the development of Jung’s theories, Shen offers a valuable reminder of the many commonalities among humans from all nations as they seek greater levels of self-awareness.

In the early twentieth century C. G. Jung survived an intense encounter with the unconscious. He did this by giving expression to his inner world in the paintings and dialogues found in the Red Book. Yet Jung felt alone in this work, unable to find a precedent or cultural parallel, until he discovered alchemy. This ancient “protoscience” became the bridge Jung had been seeking between the remote past and the present. Yet between the downfall of alchemy in the eighteenth century and Jung’s Red Book in the twentieth, it seems that there was a gap in the tradition. According to Jungian analyst and author Thomas Elsner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great visionary poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is another link in that golden chain. In Elsner’s analysis, Coleridge’s nineteenth century night-sea journey can today be understood as a symbolic self-portrait of the collective unconscious, a self-portrait that, like the Red Book, finds its historical context and continuity in the alchemical tradition. Continuing the highly esteemed works arising from the Fay Lecture Series, sponsored by the Jung Center, Houston, Elsner’s A Flash of Golden Fire: The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of the Modern Soul in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” promises to further extend the understanding and appreciation of Jungian principles for practitioners, analysts, others interested in Jungian theory and practice, the psychological dimensions of Romantic poetry, and the evolution of Western consciousness.

“Explore the collective unconscious from a different angle and perspective than we have seen in the European, Slavic, Celtic, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern cultures,” says series editor Michael Escamilla in the foreword to Nancy Swift Furlotti’s The Splendor of the Maya: A Journey into the Shadows at the Dawn of Creation. This examination and amplification of K’iche’ Maya creation mythology from Mesoamerica fills a gap in Jungian literature by illustrating the contributions to the collective psyche of an important indigenous American culture with which readers may not be familiar. Furlotti’s work offers an interesting juxtaposition with the prevailing Western scientific-rationalistic views that have typified psychological inquiry for the past two-and-a-half centuries.Contrasting with the mostly linear orientation of Western scientific and literary traditions, Maya mythology and culture are typified by a cyclical view of time, creation, and experience coupled with an understanding of humanity as in community with—rather than hierarchically superior to—the natural world. Turning to Popol Vuh, or “Dawn of Life,” the Maya creation myth that details the repeated creation and destruction of the world, Jungian analyst and scholar Furlotti seeks “to extract the psychological meaning of the myth that may be pertinent to both the collective understanding of myth as well as the individuals’ process of what Jung described as individuation.”Noting how a culture’s myths move hand in hand with its development, Furlotti forges connections with ancient wisdom to reconnect with the foundational metaphors that guide all human experience. The Splendor of the Maya brings fresh perspectives to the collective, often unconscious associations that link the human psyche across time and culture.