Opening the Unseen Heart

OPENING THE UNSEEN HEART

Book Review of Kenneth A. Kimmel’s EROS AND THE SHATTERING GAZE: TRANSCENDING NARCISSISM.

By Elizabeth Clark-Stern

What a feast for the mind, to encounter Kenneth Kimmel’s timely book. I was in the airport this past May, and saw the cover of Newsweek. A quite innocent-looking baby pig stared out at the camera. The title: What Makes Men Act Like Pigs. I bought the issue, and kicked myself when the contents provided no substantive analysis. I was hungry for an exploration beyond a re-cap of the public behaviors of famous men. I also wanted a narrative that offered a larger vision of the historic human malady of the narcissistic male.

Eros and the Shattering Gaze is that book.

Kimmel takes us on a sumptuous journey, using the vibrant medium of myth, movies, clinical vignettes, and contemporary portraits of such luminaries as Carl Jung and Bill Clinton, both of whom struggled with their own narcissism. Down, down we go into the shattered self that begins at the doorstep of the wounded mother-son relationship.

And yet, this is no linear Oedipal tale. The beauty of Kimmel’s approach is its multi-dimensionality. I found myself reading the book as if entering a series of caves or tunnels connecting to vitally diverse castles, shaman’s huts, or suburban houses above ground. Just as I thought I had come upon a “definitive” theory, a new chamber would open, and an unconsidered perspective enriched all that had gone before.

Out of the Shadows performance in Seattle

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

Performance is May 7, 2011

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.

Too Far to Travel: Purchase Copies of this fine play from the publisher at the Fisher King Press Online Bookstore.

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.

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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Eros and the Shattering Gaze

Another Fisher King Press Jungian psychology title is on the way!

Eros and the Shattering Gaze
Transcending Narcissism

by Kenneth A. Kimmel

This timely and innovative expose by contemporary Jungian psychoanalyst, Ken Kimmel, reveals a culturally and historically embedded narcissism underlying men’s endlessly driven romantic projections and erotic fantasies, that has appropriated their understanding of what love is. Men enveloped in narcissism fear their interiority and all relationships with emotional depth that prove too overwhelming and penetrating to bear--so much so that the other must either be colonized or devalued. This wide-ranging work offers them hope for transcendence.

Explores 

• Transcendence of Narcissism in Romance
• Men’s Capacity to Love
• Kabbalistic Mysticism
• Post-modern Philosophy 
• Contemporary Trends in Psychoanalysis

Table of Contents

Part One - Narcissism in the Romantic: The Mother, Her Son, His Lover 

1 The Great Round 

2 The Death Coniunctio: Tales of Fatal Love 

3 The Split Feminine: Mother, Lover, Virgin, Whore 

4 Analyst, President, Surgeon: The Split Feminine in Contemporary Man 

Part Two - The Predator Beneath the Lover

5 Hatred for the “Taint of the Human” 

6 Demon Lover and the Abuse of Imagination 

7 A Deadly Narcissism: Saturn’s Wounded Eros 

8 Clemency on the Way to the Gallows: Transcending Trauma and Dissociation 

Part Three - The Shattering Gaze

9 Wounded by the Other

10 Emergence of the Father 

11 The Capacity to Love: Transcendence of the “Heat-Death” of Eros 

About the Author

Ken Kimmel is a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle since 1981, and a clinical and faculty member of the North Pacific Institute for Analytical Psychology.  A portion of his graduate fieldwork in 1974--the practice of Spiritism in Brazil--has been published in Realms of Healing, by Stanley Krippner and Alberto Villoldo, (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1976). His graduate studies and internship compared  archetypal motifs found in cross-cultural healing, shamanic initiation and dream practices with those found in dreams and fantasies of hospitalized, psychotic, and unmedicated patients who were part of a clinical study.

He is the former Director of the Pacific Northwest Center for Dream Studies. For three years he participated in a seminar program for the study and practice of British Object Relations psychoanalysis, prior to beginning Analytical training in 2002, where he received his Diploma in Analytical Psychology in 2008.

Product Details

Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: Fisher King Press; First edition (June 21, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1926715497

ISBN-13: 978-1926715490

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

• We Ship Worldwide.
• Credit Cards Accepted.
• Phone Orders Welcomed: +1-831-238-7799 skype: fisher_king_press