While awaiting Jung's Red Book, why not try something Green?

While patiently (and impatiently) awaiting C.G. Jung's Red Book, why not try something Green?

Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way
by Lawrence H. Staples

Promethean Guilt* is the guilt we incur for the sins we need to commit if we are to grow and fulfill ourselves. Those sins that benefit us could not be committed without a creative, Promethean spirit that is supported by an obstinate and irreverent insolence toward authority that is informed by a love of freedom.

*Jung talked about Promethean guilt in his Collected Works (CW7, par. 243n). Here Jung was talking about the state of inflation that analysands often reach when they begin to experience an increase in consciousness as a result of insights that come from accessing the collective unconscious. Jung goes on to say in the note that “every step toward greater consciousness is a kind of Promethean guilt: through knowledge, the gods are as it were robbed of their fire, that is, something that was the property of the unconscious powers is torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of the conscious mind. The man who has usurped the new knowledge suffers, however, a transformation or enlargement of consciousness, which no longer resembles that of his fellow men.” This results in a loneliness, the pain of which “is the vengeance of the Gods.”

Lawrence Staples 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.

Here’s a direct link to Guilt with a Twist at amazon.com, available as a kindle edition, too.

Phone orders welcomed, Credit Cards accepted. Call 1-800-228-9316 toll free in the US & Canada, International +1-831-238-7799.

Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Finalist of NAAP Gradiva® Award

Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path
is 1 of 3 finalists for the Theoretical category of the NAAP Gradiva® Award.

In Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero's Path, Erel Shalit provides new thoughts and views on the concepts of Hero and Shadow. From a Jungian perspective, this Fisher King Press publication elaborates on mythological and psychological images. Myths and fairy tales explored include Perseus and Andersen's The Cripple. You'll also enjoy the psychological deciphering of Biblical stories such as Amalek - The Wicked Warrior, Samson - The Impoverished Sun, and Jacob & the Divine Adversary. With the recent discovery of The Gospel of Judas, Dr. Shalit also delves into the symbolic relationship between Jesus and Judas Iscariot to illustrate the hero-function's inevitable need of a shadow.

About the Author
Erel Shalit is a Jungian psychoanalyst in Ra'anana, Israel. He is a training and supervising analyst, and past president of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology (ISAP). He is the author of several publications, including The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel and The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego. Articles of his have appeared in Quadrant, The Jung Journal, Spring Journal, Political Psychology, Clinical Supervisor, Round Table Review, Jung Page, Midstream, and he has entries in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Dr. Shalit lectures at professional institutes, universities, and cultural forums in Israel, Europe, and the United States.

Order your copy Enemy, Cripple, Beggar from Fisher King Press.

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"The Word Made Flesh" - a presentation.

Oct. 10th, “The Word Made Flesh” a presentation at the San Francisco Jung Institute Conference on The Living Symbol.

CONFERENCE:
The Living Symbol In and Out of the Consulting Room - Maria Chiaia, Naomi Lowinsky, Richard Stein, Bryan Wittine, Suzanne Wagner
Saturday and Sunday, October 10 & 11, 2009
9:30 am – 3:30 pm

"Symbols act as transformers"
- C.G. Jung (CW Vol. 5: 232)
Living symbols are messages from the depths of our being to our conscious "I", messages that reveal mysterious things about ourselves and our lives. Psychotherapists across traditions have found that symbolic images open the way to the creative possibilities of the unconscious. We discover these images through free association, dreams, fantasies, creative productions, and within the relational field between analyst and analysand. They evoke fascination, awe, fear, joy, upset, disorientation, but are inevitably transformative when we approach them with respect and attend to them in a contemplative way.

In this conference five Jungian analysts with different approaches will speak to their experience of living, transforming symbols in their lives and clinical work. What does the living symbol look like in clinical practice and in life? How does the symbol enter our psyche, and what does it do once it becomes known? What are the spiritual implications of symbols? Through lectures that include theory, art, poetry, and clinical material, the speakers will offer their unique perspectives on the ways symbols guide processes of growth in and out of the consulting room.

The Word Made Flesh - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

It is as if the poet could still sense, beneath the words of contemporary speech and in the images that crowd in upon his imagination, the ghostly presence of bygone spiritual worlds, and possessed the capacity to make them come alive again. As Gerhart Hauptmann says: "Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word." - Jung, (CW 5 p. 303)

Our medium, in analysis, is language: the spoken word. Like poets we seek the "primordial word." We are engaged in the Promethean art of bringing life, fire, libido back to our analysand's word: so the word is made flesh; the symbol comes to life; the God is renewed.

When a person stumbles into analysis, she is typically split off from the surge of her libido, cut off from the meaning of her words, severed from her authenticity and from her Gods. She is incarcerated in taboos and constrictions that block her feeling, steal her breath, smother her fire.

If the analysis goes well she will find her way back, through the circumambulations and meanderings of the analytic conversation, to her own primordial word. She and her analyst will create a private language, a personal Tarot deck of living symbols, born of their shared wanderings in her internal landscape: her Gods and demons, dreams, memories, wounds, and longings. This is the stuff of her soul. Together they come to know what moves her, what excites her, how her words become flesh. Perhaps she will find a creative form in which to manifest the power of her personal symbols.

I propose to tell the story of such an analysis, the one I know best – my own – and to reflect on how language and poetry expresses the living symbol: the word made flesh. A series of poems about my analytic experience will structure the talk.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PhD, is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and a widely published poet. Her book on creativity, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, has just been published by Fisher King Press. She has published a collection of poems about the analytic experience, Crimes of the Dreamer. She is the poetry editor of Psychological Perspectives, teaches writing classes in many settings, and is in private practice in Berkeley.