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J A M E S H O L L I S
Foreword by David H. Rosen
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NUMBER EIGHT
Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology

David H . Rosen, General Editor
imagination
JAMES HOLLIS
Foreword by David H. Rosen
TEXAS A & M UNIVERSITY PRESS
College Station
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L i b r a r y o f Congress C a t a l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c a t i o n Data
H o l l i s , James, 1940-
T h e archetypal i m a g i n a t i o n / James H o l l i s ;
foreword by D a v i d H . Rosen. — 1st ed.
p. c m . — ( C a r o l y n a n d Ernest Fay series
i n analytical p s y c h o l o g y ; n o . 8)
Includes b i b l i o g r a p h i c a l references a n d index.
ISBN 0-89096-932-9 (cloth : alk. paper);
ISBN 13: 978-1-58544-268-3 (pbk.)
ISBN 10:1-58544-268-2 (pbk.)
1. Archetype (Psychology) 2 . Imagination

3. Jungian psychology. 4. Psychoanalysis.
I. Title. II. Series.
BF175.5.A72H65 2000
153-3—dc2i 99-057388
CIP
NUMBER EIGHT

David H . Rosen, General Editor
The Carolyn and Ernest Fay edited book series, based initially on the
annual Fay Lecture Series in Analytical Psychology, was established to
further the ideas of C. G. Jung among students, faculty, therapists, and
other citizens and to enhance scholarly activities related to analytical
psychology. The Book Series and Lecture Series address topics of i m -
portance to the individual and to society. Both series were generously
endowed by Carolyn Grant Fay, the founding president of the C. G.
Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas. The series are in part a
memorial to her late husband, Ernest Bel Fay. Carolyn Fay has planted
a Jungian tree carrying both her name and that of her late husband,
which will bear fruitful ideas and stimulate creative works from this
time forward. Texas A & M University and all those who come in con-
tact with the growing Fay Jungian tree are extremely grateful to Carolyn
Grant Fay for what she has done. The holder of the McMillan Profes-
sorship in Analytical Psychology at Texas A & M functions as the gen-
eral editor of the Fay Book Series.
Or
Contents
List of Illustrations / ix
Foreword by David H . Rosen / x i
Acknowledgments / xv
Introduction / 3
Archetypal Imaginings: The Golden String
Which Leads to Heavens Gate
Chapter 1/13
Religious Imaginings: Divine Morphologies
Chapter 2/35
Literary Imaginings: Envisioned Logos
Chapter 3 / 59
Incarnational Imaginings: The Painters Eye on Eternity
Chapter 4 / 9 9
Therapeutic Imaginings: Psychopathology and Soul
Afterword / 119
Re-Imagining the Soul
Notes / 125
Bibliography / 131
Index / 135
lustrations
Paintings by Nancy Witt

Opening I 66
Inside I 70
Capron I 72
Sue s Fan I 77
Chalice I 81
Windows I 82
Second Opening I 85
Rhyton I 87
Glass Darkly I 89
Painting (V) I 91
Bailey Won I 93
Cicatrice I 95
Ring of Fire I 97
"ovenwS
Imagination is more important than information.

—Albert Einstein
This book on archetypal imagination is critically needed medicine in

this world where information engulfs us. It also serves as a dose of
imaginative soul to help immunize us against the overwhelming ex-
pansion of ego-based information technology. In addition to writing
this book, James Hollis has done us a great service by emphasizing in
it the universal and ancient roots of imagination, which represent a kind
of natural health food available to us, at all times, from within. Hollis
challenges us to follow Anthony Storr's prescription from Solitude: A
Return to the Se//because it fuels the creative imagination and its spiri-
tual, artistic, and therapeutic manifestations. As Joan Chodorow has
1
written, "Jung's analytic method is based upon the [innate] healing

function of the imagination." Jung's concept of active imagination (the
2
same thing as creative imagination) requires a meditative state in which

the ego is relaxed. This state of reverie allows access to the vast inner
world of ancient, but living, symbols. Once in this state, a person can
utilize wu wei (the Taoist concept of "creative quietude") in order to
begin the process of letting things happen in the psyche, which culmi-
nates in a creative product or work of art. 3
Imagination is the eye of the soul.

—Joseph Joubert
Being alone (all One) with nature is intricately tied to human imagi-
nation and the divine, which is the focus of chapter 1, "Religious
Imaginings." Hollis amplifies Jung's central archetype of the Self—the
numinous Mystery—which is often experienced as inner or outer light
in the abyss of darkness. The archetypal and instinctual soul image is
at the core of all religious experiences that transform a life of neurotic
suffering into one of hope and meaning. Over and over Hollis reveals
how healing and wisdom (that is, spiritual knowledge) occur, and he
shows how these are related to symbols of transformation and creative,
active imagination.
An uncommon degree of imagination

constitutes poetical genius.
—Dugald Stewart
In chapter 2, "Literary Imaginings," Hollis utilizes two of Rainer Maria

Rilke's poems from the Duino Elegies to illustrate how words create
numinous images that provide divine inspiration and celebrate the
awesome mystery of life, love, and death. Rilke writes creatively about
all things ordinary and extraordinary. Hollis underscores Rilke's heal-
ing message to "praise this world to the angel." Rilke knew that the
spiritual realm alone is the source of ultimate meaning, and his dis-
covery of that truth lives on through his poetry.
Everything you can imagine is real.

—Pablo Picasso
In chapter 3, "Incarnational Imaginings," Hollis leads us to an under-

standing of the painter's view of eternity. Hollis singles out Nancy Witt,
a contemporary artist whose brilliant and imaginative work depicts a
visionary world. Through Hollis's descriptions, we view the active
imagination process of a gifted artist. It is clear that Witt taps into the
collective unconscious and our common spiritual heritage. We see and
learn about her growth and development, and we are stimulated to
develop pictures of our own lives and myths and of what lies beyond
our coming deaths.
( XII ) FOREWORD
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are
of imagination all compact.
—William Shakespeare
Shakespeare knew, as did Plato, that love and poetry are kinds of mad-
ness all tied to soulful imagination. It follows that psychotherapy and
soul are "Therapeutic Imaginings," the subject of Hollis's fourth chap-
ter. One of Jung's greatest gifts was to treasure the creative aspects of
mental illness. As Jung did, Hollis emphasizes that the creative spark
of soul, in the troubled imagination of the psychologically and psychi-
atrically disturbed, contains healing qualities leading to recovery and
renewal of purpose and meaning. As Hollis carefully outlines, the soul
has left modern psychology and psychiatry, and it must be retrieved
and rekindled before individual and collective healing can occur. Much
of chapter 4 concerns the creative, soulful, and healing doctor-patient
relationship. The wounded healer knows how to engage the patient's
problem, honor sacred dreams, and activate imagination and creativ-
ity, which all help the wounded patient heal. A n encouraging develop-
ment in psychology and psychiatry is evident by the recent focus on
joy, inspiration, and hope and caring for the psyche or soul and its
unique, creative, and evolutionary nature. 4
Alice Walker has said:
Our shame is deep. For shame is the result of soul injury. Mirrors,
however, are sacred, not only because they permit us to witness
the body we are fortunate this time around to be in, but because
they permit us to ascertain the condition of the eternal that rests
behind the body, the soul. As an ancient Japanese proverb states:
when the mirror is dim, the soul is not pure.
Art is the mirror, perhaps the only one, in which we can see our
true collective face. We must honor its sacred function. We must
let art help us. 5
FOREWORD (xiii)
In response to Walker's profoundly true reflection of our condition,
Hollis shows us that the archetypal imagination is the way to spiritual
re-awakening, creative products (that is, art), and soulful healing. This
book is a lovely and timely gift.
David H . Rosen
College Station, Texas
( XIV ) FOREWORD
ments
I was asked to deliver the Fay Lectures at Texas A & M University long
before the prospect of living in Texas ever occurred to me. Since mov-
ing to Texas in 1998 and becoming director of the C. G. Jung Educa-
tional Center of Houston, I have gained David Rosen and Carolyn Grant
Fay as friends and colleagues. Carolyn's vision and generosity in creat-
ing and sustaining the beautiful Jung Center of Houston for over four
decades, and the Fay Lecture and Book Series in Analytical Psychol-
ogy, have been wondrous gifts of Jung to several generations past and
many more to come. To both I am grateful for the invitation to speak
at the distinguished Fay Lectures, as I have enormous respect for those
who have spoken before me.
This book is dedicated to Jill, to our children, Taryn and Timothy,
Jonah and Seah, our grandchildren Rachel and Nicholas, and to the
people of the Jung Educational Center of Houston with whom I am
privileged to work. I also wish to thank artist Nancy Witt for allowing
me to discuss her work, reproduced here in photographs courtesy of
Katherine Wetzel. A n d may I also thank Maureen Creamer Bemko for
her deft editing. Any book, even one written by a solitary, is the work
of many.
^he (j^zcketifpal imagination
INTRODUCTION
The Golden String Which Leads to Heaven's Gate
What we wish most to know, most desire, remains unknowable and lies
beyond our grasp. Each of the chapters that follow begins with this same
sentence, a reminder of the central dilemma of our condition—the
Sehnsuchtfiir Ewigekeit or yearning for eternity, as the Romantics de-
fined it—and our existential limitations, finitude, and impotence be-
fore the immensity of the cosmos. Our endeavor here will be heuristic.
It will not solve any problem, for the human dilemma is insoluble, but
it may allow us to appreciate more deeply the yearning which we em-
body, and the resources which we have employed to mediate the un-
fathomable abyss between longing and connection. In a letter the nine-
teenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert succinctly expressed this para-
dox: "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude
rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that would
melt the stars." Such images as cracked kettles and dancing bears hardly
ennoble humans, but the juxtaposition with the distant longing, which
the stars suggest, certainly creates an affective bridge across that abyss
which we all experience. Or we think of Thomas Nashe, in his effort to
conjure with the inexplicable horrors of a sixteenth-century outbreak
of the Black Death in his "A Litany in Time of Plague."
Brightness falls from the air.

Queens have died, young and fair.
Dust hath closed Helen's eye. 1
It is not so much that death shocks or surprises us, Nashe suggests, but
that there are, finally, no exceptions, no exemptions. As Job found to
his dismay, we have no signed contract with the Party of the First Part,
and all things fall. Brightness itself falls. Even queens, young and comely,
are no exception. We are reminded by the death of Britain's Princess
Diana that the queenly may die as easily in a squalid Parisian tunnel as
in state. But the movement of the images from the abstract brightness
to the more particular queens to the individual Helen reminds us of the
equality of mortality, the democracy of dust. Here again, the utilization
of imaginative figures helps us cross the bridge from the knowable world
to the unknowable, just as dreams help us intimate a relationship with
that which, categorically, we can never know: the presence and inten-
tion of the unconscious.
The thoughts now transformed into the chapters of this book were
influenced by the metaphors and inquiring spirits of two imaginative
sensibilities: Jung and Blake. Both were intuitives with a keen eye for
the suggestive detail, the reading of the surface to intimate the implicit
subtext or the layers of meaning which are embodied through the image
but which are indiscernible to the sensate eye. Just as any good therapist
is obliged to read the surface of presentations and discern the hidden
motives, the wounded permutations of eros, and the implicit strate-
gies of healing, so the spiritually sensitive person remembers, in the
words of the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, "There is another world, and
it is this one."
Humankind has developed resources to intimate the unfathomable,
to help us reach for the hem of the gods and goddesses, and to stand in
the presence of infinite values. We call these resources metaphor (some-
thing that will "carry over" from one thing to another) and symbol
(something that will "project toward" convergence). With metaphor
and symbol, we are provisionally able to approximate, to apprehend,
to appreciate that which lies beyond our powers to understand or to
control. Unfortunately, our species is prone to fall in love with its own
creations and to reify them, converting them from intimations to con-
cepts. By encapsulating the mystery, we lose it entirely. This is the ter-
rible temptation of literalist fundamentalism of all kinds. When the
temptation triumphs, the images that arise out of primal experience,
(4) INTRODUCTION
phenomenological in character, are subordinated to the needs of con-
sciousness and thus become artifacts of ego rather than intimations of
eternity. Reifying Jung's rich metaphoric mosaic, which tracks the
mysterious movement of energies, similarly reduces such metaphors
as anima or shadow or complex to metaphysical concepts or the closed
systems of allegories. Whatever the gods and goddesses are, or what-
ever the psyche intends through our dreams, is surely driven from those
images when we encapsulate them in concepts. We then lose the ten-
sion of ambiguity that would allow images and dreams to suggest, i n -
timate, and point beyond themselves toward the precincts of mystery.
Perhaps life is inherently meaningless, the raw flux of molecules
forming, interacting, dissolving, and forming anew elsewhere. We have
to be intellectually honest and admit this possibility and restrain the
ego's nervous protest. Yet we find it difficult if not impossible to be-
lieve that such a purposeless concatenation of subatomic particles could
have written the Ninth Symphony or the Declaration of Independence,
or even built the airplanes that destroyed a small town, thus inspiring
Picasso's cri de coeur, Guernica. But we do not have to answer this ques-
tion here, or now, or ever; we can abide the tension of ambiguity in
respectful service to mystery. Jung's concept of the archetype is an
eminently useful tool for us to employ in service of meaning while still
respecting the ambiguous character of the cosmos.
The concept of the archetype has attained such celebrity as to suffer
the worst of two extremes—to be misinterpreted by otherwise intelli-
gent persons, and to become a simplistic, popular term found at least
monthly in such venues as Time magazine. The former have accused
Jung of Lamarckism, a theory of organic evolution suggesting that what
is learned in one generation is biologically transmitted to the next. 2
Rather, Jung speaks of the archetype as a formative process, more prop-

erly understood as a verb than a noun. The psyche has an apparent desire
to render a raw flux of atoms intelligible and meaningful by sorting them
into patterns. These patterns themselves form patterns, that is, arche-
types create primal forms which are then filled with the contents unique
to a particular culture, a particular artist, or a particular dreamer.
O n the other hand, the popularization of the term archetype has so
reduced its radical significance that at best the word means something
ARCHETYPAL IMAGININGS (5)

important, universal, or moving. The idea of the archetype deserves
better than this vague definition. Indeed, our capacity for symbol mak-
ing differentiates us from all other natural species and makes our spiri-
tuality possible. It is our imaginal capacity (our ability to form images
which carry energy) that constructs the requisite bridges to those infi-
nite worlds which otherwise lie beyond our rational and emotional
capacities. Without the archetypal imagination, we would have neither
culture nor spirituality, and our condition would never have tran-
scended brutish rutting in the dust en route to becoming dust itself.
We owe thanks to the Romantics for reminding us of the power of
imagination, the power to create dynamic images (Einbildungskraft).
In his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge differentiates "pri-
mary imagination," "secondary imagination," and "fancy." The last is
what today we would call taste or, at best, aesthetics: the arrangement
of form and color in pleasing proportions. But primary imagination,
Coleridge suggests, was incarnated in Hebraic mythopoesis with Yah-
weh's primal "I A m that I A m . " That is, such metaphor symbolizes the
primordial constitutive act, the summoning up of something out of
nothing, as in the Genesis announcement, "and God said it was good."
For the Hebrew sensibility, then, the logos, or act of speech, symboli-
cally represented the mystery of creation, especially the creatio ex nihilo,
for to our limited human condition, nothing exists until we summon
it to consciousness. Theretofore, creation may have existed indepen-
dently, but it was beyond the sphere of human awareness and thus lay
in the realm of non-being.
What Coleridge called the secondary imagination was what Jung
means by the archetypal power, the capacity to echo, perhaps replicate,
the original creatio through the generative power of an image. This
generative power redeems image from the vagaries of human fancy,
the velleities or inclinations of fashion, idiosyncrasy, and complex, and
resonates with the power of divine creativity. As the poet Rilke claims,
all of creation itself awaits this naming power to bring it into being.
Other so-called Romantics sought to redeem the worth of imagi-
nation from the Aufkldrung where John Locke defined imagination as
"decaying sense." According to Locke, the power to summon up the
( 6 ) INTRODUCTION
image of a tree depended upon the fading sensate inscriptions of past
experience on the tabula rasa of the m i n d . However, for Goethe,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and such thinkers as Kant and Schleier-
macher, the imagination was the door to divinity. No one spoke more
eloquently about the divine power of the imagination than the engraver
William Blake. In a letter written in 1799 he noted, "to the eyes of the
man of imagination Nature is imagination itself. As a man is so he sees
. . . to me this world is all one continued vision." For Blake and the
3
Romantics, imagination is our highest faculty, not our reason, which

is delimited by its own structures. Kant clearly proved that point in A
Critique of Pure Reason, and Blake wittily remarked upon reason's lim-
its in his lines "May God us keep / from single vision and Newton's
sleep." (While Blake admired the imaginative power of Newton and
4
his dynamic metaphor for the cosmos, he despised the mechanistic

mentality which it had begotten in Newton's successors, much as we
today may decry the banishment of psyche from the practice of most
psychology.) It is the archetypal imagination which, through the agen-
cies of symbol and metaphor and in its constitutive power of imaging,
not only creates the world and renders it meaningful but may also be a
paradigm of the work of divinity. O n another occasion Blake wrote with
stunning emphasis: "The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination /
God himself that is The Divine Body . . . In Eternity A l l is Vision." 5
Huston Smith, a historian of religion, once asked me this question:

Does the archetype originate in the human psyche alone or does it have
a function transcendent to individual experience? While we cannot
6
know the answer to that question definitively, I surmise that the ar-
chetypal function (remember archetype as verb) does both. It is the
means by which the individual brings pattern and process to chaos,
and it is the means by which the individual participates in those ener-
gies of the cosmos of which we are always a part. The archetypal imagi-
nation is, as Wordsworth defined it in "Tintern Abbey,"
a motion and a spirit, that impels

all thinking things, all objects of all thought,
and rolls through all things.

Our intuition of this power fits what Wordsworth described as
a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.7
A practical manifestation of this process of archetypal imagining and

a practical illustration of where our confusions arise can be seen i n
analysis.
I once worked with a Western physician who also practiced Eastern
healing arts, both in private practice and at a major East Coast hospi-
tal. He knew Western surgery, pharmacology, nosology and diagnosis,
emergency procedures, and family practice well. But out of his own
curiosity and desire for a more balanced picture, he had undertaken
formal study and certification in herbology, Shiatsu, and acupuncture.
He felt that these two approaches to healing, while employing differ-
ent root metaphors, were compatible and probably even more effica-
cious when combined. One system, employing mostly surgery and
pharmacology, was allopathic, that is, invasive and counterposing cer-
tain effects with opposing, more powerful effects. The other was more
homeopathic, operating from the view that health is the natural state
and that the restoration of the ordinary flow of energy, called ki, shi, or
chi, returned the person to that homeostasis we call health. While the
physician believed that both Western and Eastern medicine were help-
ful, together they surely were even more powerful in activating the
mystery of healing. In this scenario, the physician was not the cause of
healing but rather the midwife of the organism's own intention.
But the physician faced continuing opposition from his frustrated
medical colleagues. They not only demanded empirical data but also
resisted the metaphors implicit in an alternative healing practice. While
he was no stranger to, nor opponent of, standard research methods, he
knew that what he had observed in his practice bespoke the efficacy of
those Eastern healing traditions of several millennia. What he was con-
fronting is common: the limited acceptance of the archetypal imagi-
nation and the anxiety with which the familiar picture is defended.
As director of the C. G. Jung Educational Center of Houston, I have
(8) INTRODUCTION
had numerous opportunities to develop and find funding for programs
that use the expressive arts to help ordinary individuals attain greater
personal growth and development. These programs reach out to spe-
cial populations, such as the homeless, the chronically or terminally
ill, or disadvantaged children. Studies at Baylor College of Medicine
have indicated that when children are traumatized, critical pathways
of the brain are arrested, leading to intellectual and emotional i m -
pairment.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the expressive arts seem
to reactivate those portions of the brain and reinstitute growth. More-
over, a study out of Stanford University indicated that the expressive
arts are more efficacious than other interventions, be they after-school
programs, sports, community projects, or medication. In working with
an oncological facility, I learned that expressive arts restore some au-
tonomy to an individual who feels disempowered by a catastrophic ill-
ness. Patients who engaged in artistic expression generally have greater
tolerance of chemotherapy and other treatment modalities. Expressive
arts may prolong life and palliate pain, but they also undoubtedly en-
hance spiritual well-being in the face of death. (Here again, the direc-
tor of the program felt obliged to assemble hard data to justify these
observed results to colleagues, so wedded were they to the common
allopathic oncology treatments whose operative metaphors are grossly
called "slash, burn, and poison.")
The point about the expressive and healing arts is not that they rep-
resent an exciting frontier for exploration, though they do. Rather, both
Eastern healing models and the expressive arts are different ways of
imagining. Why would sticking pins in someone ease a chronic condi-
tion elsewhere in the body? Why would painting or body movement
restore portions of the brain's work? Why would imaging, sand tray,
or other creative activities assist in the tolerance of institutionalized
forms of treatment?
As suggested before, perhaps life is meaningless, but we are mean-
ing-seeking creatures who are driven to understand it. Failing that, we
attempt to form some meaningful relationship to life. We learn from
archetypal psychology, from the core of primal religious experiences,
from quantum physics, and from the artist's eye that all is energy. Matter

is a dynamic, temporary arrangement of energy. Apparently, a religious
symbol or a prayer, a work of art, or an expressive practice can so act
on our psyche as to move that energy when it has been blocked, dead-
ened, or split off.
The splitting of matter and spirit, which were last held together by
the medieval alchemists, must now be knit together, and thoughtful
theologians, imaginative physicists, and pragmatic physicians know that.
The split between religion and science has been bigoted on both sides,
ignorant, and has blocked the development of new healing modalities.
The one-sidedness of organizing metaphors of East and West led one
to preeminence in spirituality at the diminishment of the study of na-
ture, and the other to prominence in the manipulation of the tangible
world at the cost of soul. A dematerialized spirituality leads to the ne-
glect of legitimate social issues, and the de-souling of nature leads to a
bland, banal, and bankrupt superficiality.
But what is real, what is common to both sides of these dichoto-
mies is not ideology but energy. All of them are energy systems. To be
more specific, all of them are systematized images of energy. It does
not matter whether the image is religious in character, purporting to
embody the encounter with a transcendent reality, or material in char-
acter, purporting to describe the mystery of nature in incarnational flux.
Each image presents itself to consciousness through what the philoso-
pher Hans Vaihinger called a "useful fiction," an image whose purpose
is to point beyond itself toward the mystery. As the mystery is by defi-
nition that which we cannot know, lest it no longer be the Mystery, our
images are tools, not ends in themselves.
Underneath these cultural splits, the archetypal imagination seeks,
through affectively charged images, to connect us to the flow of energy
that is the heart and hum of the cosmos. With such images we have
provisional access to the Mystery. Without them, we would remain
locked forever within our bestial beginnings. Surely only fools and lit-
eralists would confuse the bridge toward the other shore with the shore
itself, or the arrow with the target, or the desire with the object of desire.
Though we begin and end with the limits of our condition, an i n -
expressible hope, a yearning for connection, a desire for meaning, and
a movement of energy toward healing drives us forward. Apparently,
( 10 ) INTRODUCTION
what is real and omnipresent is energy; what allows us to stand in re-
lationship to that mystery is image; and what generates the bridge is
an autonomous part of our own nature, the archetypal imagination.
We are never more profoundly human than when we express our yearn-
ing, nor closer to the divine than when we imagine. This linkage with
the infinite has of course been the intent of the great mythologies and
religions, the healing creative and expressive arts, and the dreams we
dream each night.
This inexplicable linkage was well known to the visionaries, the art-
ists, and the prophets. We too are obliged to wrestle anew with the
paradox that, while our condition remains fragile and sometimes ter-
rible, we are nonetheless afforded a means by which to participate in
the deepest mysteries of which we are a part and with which we long
to connect.
Those who have tracked the history of Western thought from Plato
through Newton through Hume and Kant have concluded that we can
only know the answer to those questions which our mind is capable of
asking. Our sciences are self-limiting imaginal systems, even when they
are open-ended. The matters we know conform to matters which we
can know, that is, which are within the confines of our capacities to
know. Our sciences ask only the questions we are capable of knowing.
When, however, we are visited by images which come from another
place, from mysterious origin, we are opened to something larger than
heretofore possible.
Consciousness is transformed by the encounter with mystery as
invested in images theretofore foreign to it. In the world of contempo-
rary deconstructionism, we believe that all knowledge is interpretation
and all interpretation is subjective, prejudiced by unconscious deter-
minants such class, gender, and Zeitgeist, and that no interpretation is
final or authoritative. Thus, when the cosmos reveals itself to us, it is
by way of the image foreign to consciousness. A n d it is through this
encounter with the numinous that the power of the archetypal imagi-
nation makes growth possible.
Many years ago, long before I was a therapist, I played a role in the
dream of a friend who was going through a terrible life crisis, not the
least of which included the death of his child. In the dream I had placed
ARCHETYPAL IMAGININGS ( H )
a strip of masking tape on the end of his nose. He knew that I had not
done this bizarre act as a joke or to make light of his Jobean dilemma.
When we talked over the dream and focused on what Jung called the
"obscure symbol," I spontaneously said, "Tom, what you are looking
for is as near as the end of your nose." He had an immediate reaction—
enlightenment—because his course was clear, albeit painful. He knew
what he had to do.
Despite what we know to be the infinity of our yearning and the
limits of our powers, we have been provided a means of communica-
tion with the mysteries. This power is as near as the end of one's nose.
As Blake once expressed it:
I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a hall:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in ferusalem's wall*
(12) INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
Divine Morphologies
// horses... had hands, or were able to draw with their

hands and do the work that man can do, horses would
draw the forms of gods like horses.
—Xenophanes
beyond our grasp.
Houston poet Edward Hirsch's lines, "Stars are the white tears of
nothingness. / Nothingness grieves over the disintegrating gods" stir
in us a sense of wistfulness, pathos, longing and loss, even though they
are rationally inexplicable. The personification of the stars, the evo-
1
cation of "white tears," the grieving over lost certainties—all intimate

the inexplicable, which is the chief service of symbol and metaphor.
Compare the honesty of this feeling state, and the respect for the mys-
tery which these lines portray, with the maudlin, infantilizing, and
hybristic utterances of the televangelists. Hirsch honestly reflects the
modern dilemma of living between myths, while the purveyors of one-
line theologies uphold the notion of the patriarchal parent. His lines
are part cri de coeur, part protest, and part expression of radical faith
in the immensity which lies both within and outside us. His is the hon-
esty of Robert Frost, who observed,
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places. 2
Frost's evocation of images which summon affect and point beyond

their conceptual husk toward the precincts of mystery testifies to the
sincerity of the soul's intent. His condition is ours, and it reminds one
of a comment made by the character Janie in a novel by Zora Neale
Hurston. Janie said that there are two things all people have to do in
their lives: "They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about
living for themselves." 3
The core condition of our time has been manifest as a collective spiri-
tual wound, one perhaps as traumatic as an amputation. (The theme of
personal pathology or private wounding is discussed in chapter 4.) Jung
noted that psychology was the last of the so-called social sciences to be
invented because the insights which it seeks were previously in the do-
main of tribal mythologies and institutionalized religions. When
moderns fell off the roof of the medieval cathedral, Jung wrote, they fell
into the abyss of the Self. Affective linkage to the cosmos, nature, and
4
the community was once available via tribal creation stories, heroic leg-
ends, and transformative rituals. With the loss of those connective rites
and mythic images, the problem of identity and the task of cosmic loca-
tion, or spiritual grounding, becomes an individual dilemma.
When the gods left Olympus, Jung suggested, they went into the
unconscious and reign now in the solar plexus of the individual, or are
projected into the world via the sundry sociopathies of a fragmented
civilization. Going back to Hirsch's lines, we see that they are ellipti-
5
cal, as much modernist art is, because the mythic ground has shifted
from intimate relationship with nature, from stable social fabric, and
from certainty of belief. Hirsch's metaphors, like T. S. Eliot's "this is the
broken jaw of our lost kingdoms," communicate through their very
6
"dis-location." In this existential chasm depth psychology necessarily

finds its work, for spiritual dislocation is the chief wound which lies
beneath the other wounds we treat with work, drugs, ideologies, or
desperate love.
In his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung offers a perspec-
tive which is very helpful to us:
(14) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of
the world which adequately explains the meaning of human
existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic
wholeness, from the cooperation between the conscious and the un-
conscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore
equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endur-
able—perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a
myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that "God" is
a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. 7
This paragraph is very rich and will reward us upon further consi-
deration.
First, Jung suggests, our deepest need is for a sense of spiritual, or
psychic locus, by which he means a sense of belonging to a super-
ordinate reality, a perspective on one's place in the larger scheme of
things, a confirmation of one's role, task, and purpose in striding this
planet. When Jung visited the pueblo in Taos, he learned from Ochwiay
Biano, Chief Mountain Lakes, that his people, like the Elongyi tribe of
Kenya, rose in the morning and spit in their palms, thereby presenting
their soul-stuff to the sun to welcome it in an expression of sympa-
thetic magic. Jung marveled that the people of the pueblo knew why
they were here. What seems naive to the traveler offers most what that
restless traveler is seeking—a reason for being here.
Going beyond the fact of our desire to connect with the cosmos,
Jung argues that the desire itself rises from our psychic wholeness. We
are all the carriers of that energy which fires the cosmos, what Dante
called "The love that moves the sun and the other stars." Or, as the
8
ancient smaragdine tablet(which explained the secret of the cosmos)

of Hermes Trismegistus (also known as Thoth, the Egyptian god who
invented writing) had it, "Things above are copies of things below.
Things below are copies of things above." Thus, as carriers of the same
energy which animates the cosmos, we employ the archetypal imagi-
nation as the power of constitutive ordering which makes meaning
possible. This "transcendent function," as Jung called it, not only links
us with ourselves, bridging the conscious world with the unconscious
through the venues of somatic symptom, affect, vision, and dream
RELIGIOUS IMAGININGS (15)

image, but also links us to superordinate reality through the symbolic
powers. 9
The loss of symbolic connection to self or cosmos, Jung suggests in

the excerpted paragraph, is the chief source of our illness. As he so of-
ten asserted, neurosis is suffering without meaning and the flight from
authentic being. The loss of tribal symbols, and the linkage with the
10
transcendent which they provided, obliged the meaning task to invert

as personal neurosis.
The recovery of meaning not only relocates a person in a larger or-
der of things but also supports a sense of personal identity and directs
energies in life-serving ways. (I can personally attest to encounters with
these transcendent energies through working on my own psyche, with
the psychic life of others, and in the mysterious, mythopoeic energies
which fashion our dreams. These encounters with transcendent ener-
gies are fundamentally inexplicable, but they are undeniable and re-
quire an honest person to witness with humility and awe.)
Jung further observed that science, for all its worthy powers of learn-
ing and methodology, cannot create meaning. Meaning is the epi-
phenomenal component of depth experience. When we recall that the
Greek word psyche means soul, then we are obliged to discern that the
tragedy of most modern psychologies, which divide the person into
behaviors, cognitions, and psychobiologies—each true, but each par-
tial—is that their practitioners ignore the most immediate reality of
all, namely, the suffering of the soul, as manifest in the consulting room.
The bankruptcy of modern psychology is its flight from the soul,
and therefore from the transcendent task of meaning. Such a denial of
depth is a failure of nerve in the face of largeness. Similarly, most the-
ologies have substituted the powers of institutions and clerical dogma
for the immediacy and idiosyncrasy of personal experience. We can-
not transfer experience to each other; each of us has got to go to " G o d "
and find out about living for ourselves, as Hurston reminded us. Just
as Jung reminded us that "psychotherapy can be a mere makeshift for
the avoidance with the reality of the psyche," so we regretfully conclude
that the chief motive of many religious institutions is the avoidance of
actual spiritual experience.
Both psychology and institutional religion have fallen into the
(l6) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

shadow problem where fear of the living, dynamic, sometimes anar-
chic psyche prevails. Worse, psychology and religion have addressed
their fear of the psyche by attempting to apply power and ego control,
to promote ideology rather than mythology. As understandable as these
fear-based stratagems may be, they will of course be overthrown by
those powers we call the gods and by the autonomy of the unconscious.
As Jung asserts, "The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every
instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious
mind ignores it." This is why the person who views the world in depth,
11
who reads its ciphers, as Karl Jaspers urged, sees the movement of soul
everywhere, however unconsciously processed.
Myth is not created; it is the phenomenological dramatization of
our encounter with depth. As Jung concludes, "myth is the revelation
of a divine life in man." This divine life is expressed through the
12
psyche's archetypal process, which lifts images up and out of the flux
of nature to serve as mediatory bridges to the cosmos. In speaking of
the archetype Jung means something elemental. Just as there are i n -
stincts for biological survival and social interaction, there are instincts
for spiritual connection as well. Just as our physical and social needs
seek satisfaction, so the spiritual instincts of this human animal are
expressed through the power of images to evoke affective response.
Anyone who has worked with dreams and encountered the powers tran-
scendent to ego must have some inclination of the power such images
once held for our tribal ancestors. As Jung concludes, "Myths and
fairytales give expression to unconscious processes, and their retelling
causes these processes to come alive and be recollected, thereby rees-
tablishing the connection between conscious and unconscious. What
the separation of the two psychic halves means, the psychiatrist knows
only too well. He knows it as dissociation of the personality, the root
of all neuroses." 13
This dissociation of the individual personality we know by the ugly

and misleading term neurosis, just as T. S. Eliot observed its collective
cultural form in what he called "the dissociation of sensibility"—the
chief spiritual dilemma of society. 14
The archetypal imaging power represents an aspect of our partici-

pation in the divine. Jung writes: "The archetypes are the numinous
RELIGIOUS IMAGININGS ( 17 )
structural elements of the psyche and possess a certain autonomy and
specific energy which enables them to attract, out of the conscious
mind, those contents which are best suited to themselves. The sym-
bols act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a
'lower' to a 'higher' form." 15
These two rich sentences bear further attention. Note those key
words numinous and structural. The idea of the numinous is buried in
its etymology. The word of origin means to nod, to summon, to inti-
mate; that is, the numinous is autonomous and is seeking us, solicit-
ing the attention of our consciousness. Secondly, the psyche brings
structure to this frenetic dance of atoms so that we might stand in or-
dered relationship to that flux. This order makes meaning possible; it
is the requisite for consciousness.
Moreover, as the student of dreams knows well, the invisible energy
of the psyche scavenges the known and the unknown worlds for i m -
ages to become hosts for meaning. Such image-husks are filled with
energy and present themselves dynamically for the possibility of con-
scious discernment. In addition to creating consciousness alone, these
images activate, summon, and direct libido and energy in service to
the developmental and transcendent needs of the organism. This effect
is experienced in rites of passage, in living religious symbols, and in
affectively charged life experiences which move and confound us.
Through the autonomous formation of symbols and archetypal imagi-
nation, we move to ancient rhythms and play out ancient dramas,
whether we know it or not.
The deceptions of modern culture tempt the conscious mind to serve
immediate gratification, but Jung has noted that, in the end, such ide-
ologies as materialism, hedonism, and narcissism simply do not work,
and they do not connect. Meaning only comes "when people feel that
they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama.
That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and
you can dismiss it. A career, the producing of children, all are maya
[illusion] compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful." 16
We live in a spiritually impoverished time, and Jung argues "that it

would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-
lessness, instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate
(l8) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

heirs at all." Although we have lost our spiritual connection, we have
17
not lost our spiritual desire. In the same way, although we are without
gods, they have not disappeared. The problem is simply that the i m -
ages generally available to us have lost the power to point beyond them-
selves and thus to connect us with the mystery, although we may cling
to those image-husks with fundamentalist fervor to mask our disqui-
etude. Even Jesus noted this tendency when he said to his disciples, " M y
Kingdom is spread all over the earth, and you do not see it." 18
While a person who works in sincere dialogue with others, submits

to the urges of creative impulse within, and tracks the invisible world
through his or her dreams will have a living spirituality, this person is,
sadly, atypical in our time. For all of us, the symbolic world is as near
as tonight's dream, or even in a deepened understanding of our neu-
rotic symptoms. We have, however, the opportunity to take a histori-
cal trip to recollect how meaning is found, how the gods and goddesses
rise invisibly from the depths, and how we are part of a timeless drama.
The inescapable solipsism of our condition often imprisons us in
the limits of our narrow frame of conscious life and biographical ex-
posure. When we approach the religion of others we find ourselves
unmoved or inclined to condescend to anything that seems foreign to
our experience. When we examine and compare the religious, spiri-
tual, or psychological expressions of others to our own, however, we
find that the same process of archetypal imagination is at work. It be-
comes obvious that despite the disparity of time, geography, and Zeit-
geist, we are all part of one psychic family.
Consider, for example, how we conjure with the idea of God. By
definition we are constrained as finite beings before the infinite and
are constitutionally incapable of revealing much more than our own
psychology and prejudices in our theological utterances. Thus, the
Wholly Other, to use Karl Barth's phrase from Das Kirklichle Dogmatik,
remains wholly other. Nonetheless, how humans have searched for and
formulated their sense of transcendent reality provides clues, not only
to the mystery of Mystery but also to the capacity of the archetypal
imagination to provide figural access to the Divine. Let four quite dis-
parate examples serve to illustrate this imaginative power at work in
bringing us into proximity with the Wholly Other.

The Name and Nature of Zeus
Western philosophy could be said to begin with the exclamation of the

pre-Socratic Thales: panta theonplere, or "everything is full of gods!"
In this formulation Thales witnesses the depth and dynamism of all
things; he exercises the spiritual eye, the archetypal, figural imagina-
tion. He says, in effect, "Look, look, see there; it is alive!" In the post-
Newtonian universe, Blake lamented that without wonder, atoms
bumping up against other atoms leads only to entropy, even death. The
quantum physicist, working on the edge of emerging models of mat-
ter, sees energy disappear into something altogether different. The
physicist can then recover a sense of primal awe in the recognition that,
indeed, everything is full of gods. This use of metaphor is simply the
best way to be scientific, that is, to pursue scientia or a deeper knowl-
edge of things as they are and as they may be. "See there; it lives" is the
credo of the scientist, and his or her use of metaphor is the resource
used to build a bridge from conscious life to the unknown depths. As
Carl Kerenyi notes, "The fundamental word of this theology is theos.
From a strictly methodological point of view it is consoling that in order
to understand theos, no known or unknown god-concept, no 'idea of
god,' need be introduced. All we have to do is start from an experience
in which this word is spoken predicatively." In other words, the word
19
god is not a concept, nor a presumed metaphysical construct; it is an

encounter, an experience with the vitalistic cosmos.
In the same phenomenological state as Thales, the Jesuit poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins celebrated the variety and flux of life. He concludes
the poem "Pied Beauty" with praise for the humming energy which
lies beneath the world of appearances:
All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him. 20

"Who knows how" indeed. The apprehension of the divine is found in
the spiritual reading of the mundane. To the spiritual eye, the quidditas
of things becomes an aperture into infinite mystery whereby energy
animates matter.
When one considers the name and nature of Zeus, one finds many
tracks which lead from Asia and Europe to the Indo-Germanic lan-
guage which is the mother stream of our speech. A l l of those tracks
together constitute the etymology of light, both word and concept. How
are we who are finite to conjure with the infinite without resorting to
the instrument of metaphor? We might employ any concrete image to
summon up this unfathomable mystery of light, but most would fall
short of the numinosity to which it points. The ubiquity and necessity
of the sun could not have failed to impress our forebears as the source
of life, the source of growth, the light which holds back the terrifying
dark, and so on. Such associations point toward the mystery of the
energy with which the world is charged.
Kerenyi further discovered that the original metaphor, which is al-
ways a radical, phenomenological encounter, meant not so much light
as "the moment of lighting up." Thus, light as a concept is only a noun,
21
a husk; the lightening is an experience. Day versus night, light versus

dark, and energy versus entropy is profound, but the dynamic encoun-
ter with the lightening is even more powerful. Thus, the experience
involves being struck, seeing the bolt, or feeling its jolt.
This movement from concept to numinous experience is the differ-
ence between the Job who was a good, pious boy, obedient to a code of
ethics, and the Job who discovered the living God in terror and wonder.
He moves from concept to experience. Many prattle on about psycho-
therapy, whether to praise it or denigrate it. Unless one has encoun-
tered the autonomous, disruptive power of the psyche, one is merely
full of talk, full of what Whitehead called the dance of bloodless cat-
egories. Jung was very clear about such a difference. As he wrote in 1959
in an astounding letter about his use of the word god, "It is an apt name
given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychic system, subdu-
ing my own conscious will and usurping control over myself. It is the
name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path vio-
lently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans,
and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse." 22
This is not a definition of the divine found in many breviaries or

catechisms, but it is a profoundly respectful account of the author's
experience with the numinous, the autonomous Other which lies out-
side the frame of conscious control and occasions ever new possibili-
ties of depth encounter. When Jung defines neurosis as a "neglected
god," he means no denigration of anyone's theology nor scandal to
behaviorists; rather, he wishes to accord the depth energies within us a
larger measure of respect than generally afforded by the ego. He knows,
as does every depth psychologist, that such energies neglected, re-
pressed, split off, or projected, will simply find their own autonomous
and often disruptive venues for expression. As nature will not be
mocked, so the dynamic energies which course through us will nei-
ther be suppressed nor controlled forever, lest they in time break forth
as monsters.
Thus, Kerenyi is insisting that Zeus is the image which arises out of
the experience of the sun and is not the sun itself. Zeus later became a
sun god through the extension of these natural associations, but he was
originally the experience of being suffused with light itself; he was not
the light but the experience of light.
Coming down a quite different path, the poet Wallace Stevens wrote
in his poem "Sunday Morning" of the contemporary spiritual dilemma
from a postmodern perspective. Rather than seek the divine in insti-
tutional or dogmatic form, he images himself as a savage, dancing in
adoration of the pagan sun: "Not as a god, but as a god might be, / naked
among them, like a savage source." 23
This urgency to personify the cosmos is the primal religious need

to connect with the Mystery. The etymology of the word religion re-
veals two sources, one meaning "to bind back to something" {re-ligare)
and the other "to take into careful account" (religere). The former i m -
pulse is toward reuniting with the source from which one has become
estranged, and the latter is to respect the gravitas of that mystery. When
Stevens writes "not as a god, but as a god might be," he is both acknowl-
edging the postmodern recognition of the husk which has lost its sa-
cred energy and also affording an existential respect for the power of
the numinous. To dance about the sun as a savage sensibility, Stevens

suggests, will perhaps bring one closer to re-evoking that numinous
mystery than would pious acts sanctified by dogma.
Jung, as usual, has anticipated this discussion and even uses the
image of the sun to explain:
Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of

the obvious, but he has an imperative need—or rather, his un-
conscious psyche has an irresistible urge—to assimilate all outer
sense experiences to inner, psychic events. It is not enough for the
primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must
at the same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course
must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis,
dwells nowhere except in the soul of man. 24
This need to assimilate, to internalize, is the need we all have to render

the world personal and experiential in a spiritual and meaningful way.
Among the fifteen or so subject areas in which analysts are examined
at the Jung Institute in Zurich is the psychology of primitive cultures.
As the word primitive is out of fashion now, one might substitute the
word primordial. We were asked to demonstrate knowledge of many
topics of anthropological significance because the human psyche has
not changed. There are certain forms and motifs common to all cul-
tures irrespective of cultural overlay, and the nature of primordial
thinking about profound experience remains common to us all. We
see magical thinking, projection, conversion, transference, projective
identification, spirit possession, and a host other psychic phenomena
manifest not only in psychotic process but in everyday life as well.
Yet the failure to internalize primary experience is why the light has
gone out in so many religious and academic institutions. It is not
enough to have the received image; it must retain the power to move
one personally, direct libido in service of personal development or
cultural sublimation, and stir the heart while persuading the brain.
Moreover, such images must further contribute to one's sense of par-
ticipation in that divine drama of which Jung spoke. Hence the ascent,
the pleroma, and the descent of that brilliant gaseous mass in the sky
is analogized so that we might understand both the vital principle we
call gods and goddesses as well as something about the life-transit of
each of us.
In the death and rebirth of the sun, in the defeat of darkness, in the
oxymoronic "eternality of evanescence" are found the essential and
universal experiences of otherwise individualized lives. Jung contin-
ues, "they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama
of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness byway
of projection—that is, mirrored in the events of nature. The projec-
tion is so fundamental that it has taken several thousand years of civi-
lization to detach it in some measure from its outer object." 25
To read the cosmos, then, we need to read the psychic life of indi-
viduals. Or, put another way, we read myth to learn what is in the
human soul; we read the human soul to learn the dynamic laws and
principles of the mythic cosmos. Jung asks why psychology is the
youngest of the empirical sciences and why we did not long before
discover the unconscious and raise up its treasure-house of eternal
images. His answer? "Simply because we [previously] had a religious
formula for everything psychic." Because of this progressive separa-
26
tion of psychic life from nature and the result, a de-souled cosmos, we
have been obliged to invent psychology to inquire after the velleities of
the soul turned in upon itself. No wonder Eliot observed in The Waste
Land that we live amid "a heap of broken images."
How far removed this is from that time when the Greek world could
still experience the lighting up as both an inner and an outer experi-
ence^—an experience which could once be evoked in the utterance of
the sacred word Zeus. Such an experience is truly religious, in both
senses of the word, for there is a re-connective process and a deeply
considered event.
Added to this moment when inner and outer theophany are one is
the experience of the daimon, a most personal encounter with the d i -
vine. The daimon maybe seen as both transpersonal and intrapersonal.
The daimon is the intermediary agency, as in the Christian mythologem
of the Holy Spirit, yet it was experienced in intensely personal ways so
that each of us might claim to have our particular daimon.
Surely each of us has had from childhood on a deeply intuited sense
of an interior Other who was manifest in sundry ways, who could not

be summoned at will but was one's familiar, and who knew us, and knew
other matters, more deeply than we could comprehend. Most of us have
lost contact with that presence, and surely one of the greatest tasks of
therapy is to reintroduce a person to his or her daimon—the individual
yet transpersonal dimension which drives us, wants something of us,
and constitutes our linkage to largeness. I recall one woman who called
her daimon by the anagram T W I H A T , standing for "that which I have
always thought." When it spoke, through dreams, sudden insights, and
openings to the world beneath this world, she listened.
Hidden in the etymological recesses of the gods and goddesses are
radical (that is, fundamental) insights into the nature of reality. In fact,
we could define these divine beings archetypally, symbolically speak-
ing, as the affect-laden, highly charged, numinous images which arise
out of a depth experience. For this reason, they are present in love and
war, as we all know, and even in those experiences that arise out of the
psychopathology of everyday life and which Jung dared call "god." We
smile and nod in recognition at the name Poseidon, whose eponymous
metaphor means earth-shaker. Whoever set out on Homer's wine-dark
sea, or stood close by while black sails sank beneath the horizon, or
trembled amid the great power which shook beneath one's feet knows
the metaphor of earth-shaker well. Or one thinks of Ceres, the god-
dess of grains, from whom we get our diurnal cereal. She sacrifices her
body, which is broken on the threshing floor, alchemically transformed
into bread, and then inexplicably converted into sinew, brain matter,
and the yearnings of the soul. Who could account for these things? Who
cannot but stand and praise with the heart (and hopefully a ready
metaphor) what will forever confound the mind?
The development of modernism represents the diminishment of the
numinosity of these root metaphors and their incremental replacement
with artifacts of intellect. As tools of the intellect, these root metaphors
are easily manipulated, but they are less and less able to stir the heart
or move the soul. Kerenyi delineates this declension:
Human experience does not always give rise immediately to ideas.

It can be reflected in images or words without the mediation of
ideas. M a n reacted inwardly to his experience before he became a
RELIGIOUS IMAGININGS (2 )
5
thinker. Prephilosophical insights and reactions to experience are
taken over and further developed by thought, and this process is
reflected in language. . . . Language itself can be wise and draw
distinctions through which experience is raised to consciousness
and made into a prephilosophic wisdom common to all those who
speak that language. 27
To summarize, a primal experience begets an image which is the car-

rier of the mystery. For a time, a moment or a millennium, that image
remains suffused with energy and may be evoked to summon the pri-
mary experience or a simulacrum of it. As time is the enemy of sym-
bol, and the deities have their own agenda, the energy leaves the image,
which remains an artifact of mind, a husk which once the gods and
goddesses inhabited. The oldest of religious blasphemies is the literal-
ization of the husk and its worship, when the energy has already gone
elsewhere. This is idolatry, and its servant is that reification which pro-
tects itself against the gods and goddesses by worshiping their graves.
When such vital linkage leaves the individual, he or she suffers neuro-
sis; when it leaves the tribe, it occasions a cultural crisis, with all of
those sociopathies which beset us today. The suffering occasioned by
the loss of the light is what made analytic psychology necessary. It is a
means of helping the individual find his or her own way back to the
precincts of numinosity.
The Insect God of Dung
O n my desk in Houston there is a four-inch-long alabaster carving of

a scarab. Those of us who were raised in the Western religious tradi-
tion, which is to say, the dogmas, rituals, conventional art, and defin-
ing institutions of the medieval and Renaissance eras, may find it hard
to conjure with the idea of a dung beetle as an image of divinity. Not
only is it lacking in grandeur, but it hardly seems to exalt or glorify the
idea of the eternal. Yet in this lowliest of creatures, we once again find
the archetypal imagination at work. Even Blake, in "The Songs of In-
nocence and Experience," had to wonder if G o d had intended some

sort of private joke when he made "our places of joy excrementitious."
Taking a clue from the Egyptian imagination, however, we find that
the most religious of ideas—the idea of death and resurrection—
emerges out of the humblest of matter.
The lowly but sacred beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) serves as the object
of imaginal exfoliation when it is found in sarcophagi and when it seem-
ingly arises out of dung. What idea could be more profound than this,
that out of death new life emerges? The sun, which is born over and
over again, similarly suggested death and rebirth and the natural
rhythm of things, and the great solar disk is central to Egyptian ico-
nography. A n d these two symbols, scarab and sun, are logically linked;
the Egyptians observed that the dung beetle laid its larvae in dung,
rolled that dung into a ball, and pushed it into holes which it had dug
for this purpose. After a period of gestation, the beetle pulls the hard-
ened ball, reminiscent of the sun-disk, back out into the sun. When
the sun's rays dry and crack open this vas hermeticum, new life emerges.
How powerfully these two images, of the dying and reborn sun and
the beetle who brings life out of dead matter, speak to the primal imagi-
nation. The deity Kheperi, the god of transformations, was frequently
depicted with a scarab beetle on his head or a scarab for his head. In
modern Sudan, the scarab beetle is still dried and mixed into fertility
potions for women. 28
Some individuals might think such imagery arose from those with
too much time on their hands, and they would be right. But today we
have too little time on our hands. So distracted are we by the pace of
modern life that we grow separated from the natural world and our
wonder before it. As the pace of life accelerated in early modern Eu-
rope four hundred years ago, the mathematician/theologian Blaise
Pascal wrote in his Pensees that the secret task of civilization was to offer
divertissement or "distraction," lest we grow terrified of being wholly
present to ourselves.
Before moving to Texas I had an office with a cathedral ceiling and
glass walls on three sides. As I sat for a decade in the same chair, at the
same hours, day in and day out, I became aware of the transits of the
sun. While such solar progression would have been imperceptible to
the distracted person, I began to note how different objects received a
RELIGIOUS IMAGININGS (2 )
7
unique angle of light and took on various textures every day, as the
hours and seasons passed. In a year, of course, we returned to the be-
ginning and started anew. This simplest of observations, which any
shepherd on any hillside would have similarly experienced, filled me
with awe and stirred a sense of participation in the Mystery.
Our time in the changing lights of this cycling sun is so brief, but
this cycle is eternal. When we become present to such feeling-laden
experience, we have religious experience, that is, we are reconnected,
and we observe with gravitas. However conventional, or even obvious,
my observation, it was a moving reminder to me of both personal eva-
nescence and at the same time participation in the archetypal rounds.
So it must have been to the Egyptian who observed the lowly beetle in
its instinctual rounds and became aware that we truly are, as Jung said,
participants in a sacred drama. Surely this is why we long to visit the
ocean or stand before a mountain range—to return to our small place
before the large, to recover a sense of cosmic proportion.
It was from the French structural anthropologists Lucien Levy-Bruhl
and Claude Levi-Strauss that we gained a new appreciation for the
"primitive m i n d " (better termed "primal mind," which does not imply
inferiority). In contrast to the primal mind, we as moderns have fallen
into ethnocentrism by valuing a particular form of conceptualizing,
most commonly a cause-effect thought process: A begets B. The mean-
ing of A and B arises out of the predication of B by A and, increasingly
in America, the cost to produce B from A .
For the primal mind, however, the meaning of a concept is not de-
rived from causality but from imaginative association. Thus, a mod-
ern mind would hear a door slam and conclude that the sound meant
the door was now shut. But the primal imagination may associate the
sound with the event of passage through that door.
In this example of the door, the primal imagination saw life emerg-
ing from the basest of matter and was stirred to grasp a dynamic truth.
Although the modern mind would label this idea illogical, it in fact
follows a logos of perhaps a higher order, the logic of imaginative as-
sociation. The image is not itself the concept, as the modern mind
would have it, but rather what the image may stir in the unconscious,
or what aperture it may open to depth.
( 28 ) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION
While the modern mind can produce great wonders, and great hor-
rors, it can just as easily sever itself from the archetypal roots of our
spiritual nature, which sustained and nourished us through the cen-
turies. The power to connect with the transpersonal will surely prove
even greater than the power to fractionate. The chief cause of our psy-
chological distress, our spiritual malaise, is the deracination of our
archetypal rooting in nature and the poverty of affective, imaginative
association with the passing wonders of the world.
The Latchkey to Eternal Life
Once while touring Ireland my wife and I visited a burial site named
New Grange, which had been unearthed perhaps a hundred miles
northwest of Dublin. What was once thought simply to be a hill was
found to be a domelike structure measuring about three hundred feet
across the top. To enter the tomb, one walks down a narrow tunnel
perhaps fifty feet into the earth. Therein lies a chamber which served
as a burial place for an unknown civilization that pre-dated the Celts
and the Egyptian pyramids. The guide turned off the one electric light
in the chamber and allowed us to be in total darkness in the three thou-
sand-year-old tomb, after telling us that the entire structure was com-
posed of cantilevered boulders with no mortise-and-tenon, nail, or
super-glue holding it together. A single sneeze might do it, I thought;
after all, why would we expect any building to last three millennia?
As we stood in this place I had three thoughts in this order. First,
and most obviously, I was in awe of the engineering which had created
this marvel, a cantilevered dome of stone upon stone that outlasted its
engineers and testified to the window on eternity. Next, there was a latch-
key hole in the eastern quadrant of the ceiling. Between December 21
and 25 light streams through that hole and illuminates the entire cham-
ber for approximately fifteen minutes. So, secondly, I marveled at the
astronomical sophistication of the builders of that place, to have dis-
cerned so accurately the movement of the heavens that long ago. But
thirdly, I shuddered, not from being in a place of death, but rather from
being in a place of resurrection. I knew that I was in the presence of

the archetypal imagination, the realm of the Great Mother cycle of
mythology.
Such archetypal imagery bespeaks the greatest of religious ideas:
birth, ascendance, death, and then rebirth. In the place of the dead, at
the time of the winter solstice, at the time of the star of Bethlehem, at
the time of the candles of Chanukah, at the time when there is little
light, when we are in the dark realm, we are nonetheless reminded that
the planet is already spiraling back toward light, toward spring, toward
resurrection. To this moment I remain moved by the power of that
imaginative linkage. To see in the dark time the rebirth of this scintilla
of light, to bring one's dead to the place where such a profound
mythologem could be ritualized and celebrated, is to be an actor in the
sacred drama. How could we not honor those who felt such a deep
connection to the fundamental rhythm of nature, to the death and
rebirth of divine nature, and to the wonder of our own being which
partakes of the same energy?
The theologian Paul Tillich once observed that the chief curse of
our time is not that we are evil, though often we are, but that we are
banal, superficial. The recovery of depth will never come through an
act of intellect, unless that intellect is in service to wonder. We can re-
cover depth, however, by opening ourselves to the numinous which
nods at us and invites us. We can also use our imaginative power to
seize such moments of beckoning and the images which rise sponta-
neously from them.
Magic and Mistletoe
In the nineteenth century there was a substantial interest in the explo-

ration of antique civilizations, Heinrich Schliemann's explorations of
what he believed to be Agamemnon's palace at Troy being the most
notable. The brothers G r i m m traversed the Germanic states and tran-
scribed tales of the spinning wheel, the Marchen, which we today call
the fairy tales. Concurrent with the erosion of literal Christian beliefs
under the combined onslaught of new methods of biblical scholarship
and the epochal discoveries of Darwin, an interest in folk wisdom i n -

tensified as individuals sought to recover spiritual insights from other
traditions. From the founding of The Theosophical Society in London
in 1875 and the emergence of analytical psychology at the end of that
century, alternative paths to spiritual insight opened.
Interest in the great mythological traditions culminated in 1890 with
the publication of Sir James George Frazer's magisterial The Golden
Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. While all mythological, alchemi-
cal, and folk culture motifs are vast treasuries for those who would learn
the dynamics of psychological process, we will focus now on the idea
of the golden bough. What was it? Why was it important? We know
that the golden bough was carried by Aeneas in his catabasis to the lower
world. But what was the play of imagination which produced this i m -
age, and what truths perseverate through time?
Frazer was a scholar of his age. While his learning was immense, his
cultural bias seems dated today. Curious as he was at the plethora of
images available from antiquity, he tended to consider the contempo-
rary religions superior, and humanity more evolved. (This more evolved
culture would shortly slaughter itself at little villages like Verdun, Ypres,
and Passchendaele, and in the Argonne Forest, but Frazer could not
imagine such, though Dostoevski did. Nor could he imagine that the
land of Dichter und Denker—poets and thinkers—would become the
nation of Morder und Henker—murderers and hangmen). Frazer is led
to anticipate the idea of the archetypal imagination through the repli-
cation of mythologems from culture to culture. He concluded, "recent
researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential simi-
larity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind
has elaborated its first crude philosophy of l i f e . . . producing in varied
circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generi-
cally alike." 29
Frazer's interest in magic arose out of his encounter with a certain

kind of thinking, which I would call the imaginative power. He tended
to consider such thinking primitive when compared with cognitive,
syllogistic thought. But his delineation of sympathetic magic and con-
tagious magic is still helpful to us.
The idea of sympathetic magic is based on the notion of similarity.
For example, couples might copulate in newly planted fields to rouse

the powers of nature or to evoke the gods to similarly fructify. Or they
might sacrifice a plant, an animal, or an old king in order to simulate
and stimulate the cycle of sacrifice wherein new life arises out of death.
Contagious magic is based on the idea of contact. Things joined, or
which are contiguous, are forever influential on each other. We know
the truth of this when we observe the staying power of parental com-
plexes or the fact that divorce does not end a marriage. What has been
powerfully joined, for good or ill, continues to influence one with the
other in perpetuity.
What Frazer calls magic is the effort to conjure with the invisible
world, whether intentional or not. While magical thinking—the as-
sumption that my thoughts or actions can have an effect on the other—
may strike us as naive and misguided, we have to recall the power of
complexes, projections, scapegoating, psychic possession, and trans-
ference phenomena, which Jung helped identify, to admit that, indeed,
there is such movement of invisible energy for which the word magic
was once used.
Jungians puzzle other schools of psychology with their interest in
such antique material, but part of Jung's genius was to see the human
psyche as a hologram. Wheresoever it is at work, it leaves the imprint
of its pervasive dynamics. To learn of those fundamental psychic pro-
cesses which we all embody, suffer, and are driven by, we may steep
ourselves in the Marchen. To study such material is to uncover the re-
current paradigms of psychic process for individual therapy. Frazer's
magic is primary psychic process, and what he considers amusing but
interesting mythic motifs, we see constituting the residue of that ar-
chetypal imagination which renders the world meaningful.
Jung would not publish his theory of archetypes until 1912 in Sym-
bols of Transformation. Those who deny the archetypal imagination
simply have not immersed themselves in the thesaurus of images avail-
able, from East and West and from the ancient world, nor have they
sharpened the eye to see those same motifs in modern dress.
The magical thought that "like heals like," what we call homeopathic
medicine, certainly occurred to our ancestors. The golden bough is one
example. Associated with the sacred groves of Artemis/Diana, the
hunter goddess of the woods, it derives from the mistletoe which was

cut at the winter solstice. In time it turns yellow, that is, golden.
Mistletoe's presumed powers supposedly arose from the fact that it
seemed neither tree nor bush. It dwelt in the in-between, between
heaven and earth, and therefore partook of two worlds, possessing the
power to heal or destroy. (Buried in the idea of pharmakon, from which
we derive "pharmacology," is similarly the notion of killing or curing
by ingesting certain substances.) The green world mistletoe seemed
feminine to the antique imagination even as the tree around which it
was circled seemed masculine. Again, one sees the interaction of two
worlds. That it was green at the time of the winter solstice further stirred
the association with the death/rebirth theme already discussed. The
yellowing of the green was seen as a solar residue and thus, even more
in the mixing of solar and lunar, the carrier of the numinous. What
better imago of healing and of illumination of darkness, then, than
magic and mistletoe? What better guide, as Aeneas illustrated, through
the dark descents into night?
What images do we have of healing that intimate for us contact with
the mysteries? Today we swallow the magical pill manufactured in New
Jersey and fervently hope that like will continue to cure like. It is still
magic, and as we know from the placebo effect, it works all the better
the more our heart and imagination embrace the treatment. As mod-
ern medicine is coming to acknowledge, we would be better to embrace
the placebo effect as a clue to the power of psyche's healing intent than
dismiss it as a bizarre and idiosyncratic phenomenon. We know from
shamanism to the present that a key element in healing is belief in the
power of an agency to effect healing, whether that agency be a Tlingit
shaman, a Navajo sand painting, a person in a white coat at a high-
tech medical center, or a pill created in a huge factory.
In examining these four motifs, the name and nature of Zeus, the
insect god of dung, the latchkey to eternity, and the link between magic
and mistletoe, we are visiting a place in the human psyche where noth-
ing has changed. We think our age is advanced, and technologically it
is, but at the cost of that fragile linkage to the animistic powers of na-
ture. Our capacity to open our own imagination to take in the images
of other times and places, other human beings like us, reconnects us
with ourselves in the end, for we are they, and they are us. We remem-

ber that the symbolic life, as Jung called it, occurs wheresoever we en-
gage in depth. We learn so much more about the actual functioning of
the human psyche—its employment of projection, magical thinking,
and the like—than modern textbooks of behavior, cognition, and phar-
macology even attempt. We find that we are no more advanced where
it matters than were our ancestors who may have huddled in fear and
cold caves, in forests or tundras, but they had a connection to the tran-
scendent powers which we ignore at our peril.
The archetypal imagination is the means by which we encounter the
divine and how it may be reborn in us. As Jung writes,
The mediatorial product [i.e., image or symbol] . . . forms the raw

material for a process not of dissolution but of construction, in
which thesis and antithesis both play their part. In this way it be-
comes a new content that governs the whole attitude, putting an
end to the division and forcing the energy of the opposites into a
common channel. The standstill is overcome and life can flow on
with renewed power towards new goals. 30
Out of the tension of opposites, the new thing, the third, is where the
gods and humans meet, where developmental healing occurs, and
where meaning will still be found. What our predecessors lived, we have
now rendered conscious. While consciousness can be a hindrance to
transformation, it may also enable us to recover a respect for the imagi-
nal world and to confess a humbling need to track those images to see
what they may be asking of us.

CHAPTER 2
Envisioned Logos
Poetry heals the wounds reason creates.

—Novalis
beyond our grasp. In this chapter we will celebrate the power of speech
to assist us in our task of articulating this deep longing.
To my mind, while I love the work of many poets from many lands,
none surpasses that of Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke for depth of
insight, aesthetic achievement, and visionary ambition. If I had only
two boxes of books to take to the proverbial desert island, one of them
would be the Collected Works of Jung and the other would be the prose
and poetry of Rilke, born the same year as Jung, in 1875. Both would
offer inexhaustible explorations of the mystery of the psyche, no mat-
ter how long one remained on that island.
In the previous chapter I did not intend to denigrate the power of
language or to privilege phenomenological experience over conscious-
ness. Indeed, we recall the observation of Kerenyi that "Language itself
can be wise and draw distinctions through which experience is raised
to consciousness and made into a prephilosophic wisdom common to
all those who speak that language." We are using language even now
1
to activate enhanced awareness of, and the possibility of, enlarged en-
counter with the divine.
Two great energies, or dynamic principles, drive the universe. The
first is Eros, whom the Greeks considered a god. Paradoxically, Eros was
the first of the gods and the last of the gods, perhaps because he is found
at the origin of all things and is ever renewing himself in each new situ-
ation. Eros is the energy which seeks connection. Freud was right in
suggesting that the world is erotic, for it is forever seeking to combine
in new ways with the Other, whether at the molecular level or through
the Sehnsucht fur Ewigekeit. The other great power is Logos, the divid-
ing power, the principle of development through differentiation. Its goal
is clarity, or consciousness. When eros and logos combine, there is a
synergy which is extraordinarily powerful. I often find such synergy in
the writing of Rilke. His themes are the universal themes: love and
death, what depth may be seen through simple things, and why we may
be here on this spinning globe. For all the simplicity of subject, how-
ever, few writers have managed to point beyond the subject toward the
numinous as profoundly as Rilke has.
For our purposes I need to restrict our consideration to two of the
Duino Elegies. The ten Duino Elegies are verbal equivalents to Beetho-
ven's nine symphonies; they derive their name from the Duino Castle
on the Adriatic where, in 1912, Rilke was overtaken by a numinous voice
which dictated the first line of the first elegy. He wrote the Elegies off
and on for the next few years before publishing them together in 1923.
The last elegies were completed in a paroxysm of creative spontaneity
in 1922, and Rilke wrote a friend of his, "though I can barely manage to
hold the pen, after several days of huge obedience to the s p i r i t . . . I have
climbed the mountain! At last! The Elegies are here, they exist." 2
"Huge obedience to the spirit"—those are Rilke's own words for

what is surely religious experience, the possession by the daimon who
is both personal and universal, terrible and transformative. His obedi-
ence to this spirit is the necessary humility before the numinous—"Not
my will but Thine"—and, like the mother's delivery of a child, occurs
in revelatory suffering. Without suffering nothing genuinely new will
come forth. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, the courageous artist
says "unless you bless me, I will not let go of you."
If we are honest with ourselves, we are obliged to admit that there
was no significant psychological or spiritual growth in our life without
the experience of suffering. This is why Jung defined neurosis as suffering
which has not yet found its meaning, not that suffering could be elimi-
nated. Moreover, in that form of religious expression which we find in

aesthetic achievement, we acknowledge Orpheus as the mythic para-
digm, the singer who descends into the underworld even as we descend
into the unconscious to risk all—possibly to return with Euridice, or
the golden bough, the new insight, or possibly to perish. A l l of these
catabases and anabases require risk and suffering. The Danish theolo-
gian Soren Kierkegaard spoke of this paradox of the aesthetics of
suffering, and the suffering of aesthetics, in a rather horrifying parable:
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffer-

ings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs
and cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. His fate is
like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris i m -
prisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire;
their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror
into his heart: when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet
music. A n d men crowd about the poet and say to him: "You must
sing for us again soon." Which is as much to say, "May fresh suffer-
ings torture your soul but may your lips be formed as before; for
the cries would only frighten us, but the music is delicious." 3
The theme of Rilke's two elegies on which we will focus are, quite sim-
ply, love and death, the old Liebestod, in whose grip Rilke strains to ex-
press the inexpressible, as Wagner does in the music of Tristan und Isolde.
What Do We Love When We Love?
Rilke's third elegy, written in 1912-13, explores the multilevel of inti-

mate relationship. In relationship we move not only with conscious
intention but in concert with deeper, more ancient motions, chthonic
motives, primal forces, and telluric patterns. Rilke invokes the long tra-
dition of amor, that powerful energy rescued by the troubadours and
Minnesingers of the Middle Ages, that energy somewhere between eros
and agape—personal, intimate, and universal at once.
It is one thing to sing of the Beloved. A n d another, alas, to invoke
the secret, guilty River-God of the Blood. 4
LITERARY IMAGININGS (37)

As we know more and more of the biological determinants in our lives,
such as those affecting longevity or proclivity to certain illnesses and
emotional states, so we recognize that our instinctual programming is
profound, urgent, and insistent. Beneath the conventions of the praise
of the beloved there are the older, darker forces—the wonderfully epi-
thetic "River-God of the Blood." Such a force is personified and deified,
and rightly so, for our encounter with such power is always archetypal,
always capable of seizing us, possessing us, and carrying us along its
canalized course. If it is guilty, then of what? The River-God is guilty
in the sense that it secretly possesses us and obliges us to serve more
than one motive in any relationship. It is this same chthonic power
which creates Liebeswahn, or the love-madness in honor of the mad
god who possesses souls and makes them insane in turn. Like the inti-
mation of "lightening" in the name and nature of Zeus, so this duplici-
tous, hermetic god is always present.
Just as the inscription which Jung carved over the entrance to his
home in Kiisnacht reads, "Called or not called, God will be there," so
Rilke acknowledges that conscious or unconscious as the lovers may
be, the deeper and darker powers are immanent. Such an overpower-
ing experience, which we characterize as love, is religious in character,
given its gravitas, its compelling power, and its autonomy. We recall also
Jung calling "god" that which crossed his path and overthrew his will
for good or ill. Each of us has been in the hands of this god and has
been swept along by its urgent flow.
What do these lovers know of "this lord of desire... embodying the
unknown" and "arousing the night to an endless clamor"? What can
the thin wafer of consciousness know of the vast sea upon which it
tosses? Each of us has a profound ambivalence toward the inner sea in
which we swim. When James Joyce brought his schizophrenic daugh-
ter to Jung for a consultation, Jung replied, "She is drowning in that
sea in which you learned to swim." The sea of which he spoke was of
5
course that oceanic world that each of us carries within, in which even
our biographies toss in tumult.
Who of us has not been some latter-day Jonah, fleeing the summons
to witness, being swallowed by the darksome, devouring sea-monster,
and then being flung back upon an alien shore and obliged to reflect?

Like the "sinners in the hands of an angry G o d " of Jonathan Edwards,
lovers are but frail and fragile wafers, bravely but naively set upon the
sea. A n d what telluric powers await such mariners? " O h the Neptune
6
of the blood, with his fearsome trident." We know the power of Posei-
don/Neptune to shake us, drown us, wash us from the shore. We reso-
nate to this archaic force with its terrible trident, whose skewers, like
Cupid's arrows, sweetly wound and bring anguish into the world. " O h
the dark wind from his breast of spiraled shell." Thus the evocation
not only of that pagan power but also the dark wind which emanates
from him, the devouring pneuma, both wind and spirit, which animates,
moves, carries away, and sometimes destroys. While the strategy of
consciousness and of convention is to appeal to the stars, "the primal
constellations," to some celestial setting to summon up the image of
the beloved, Rilke reminds us that we are in the hands of the river-god,
the nihilistic Neptune with his terrible trident. Beware those who love
passionately, then, for they are taken and tossed, and often lost.
Rilke did not read Jung to the best of my knowledge, but as a deeply
perceptive and intuitive individual he mined the same regions of the
psyche. He knows that something larger than consciousness is evoked,
that the dark river god courses from a chthonic place. Beyond and be-
low the beloved, Rilke intuits the parental imago. The beloved only stirs
the memories, the paradigm, the programmed imago of the Intimate
Other. Speaking to the beloved he says, "Truly you did shake his heart
with older terrors, rippled through him in deeper shocks. Call him, but
you cannot pull him away from a deeper intercourse."
The "deeper intercourse" to which Rilke alludes consists of those first
and primal relationships, the internalization of which creates a pro-
found sense of Self and Other, and of the transactions between them.
All of our lives these primal parental imagoes are transferred to ever
new relationships, and their tyranny is all the greater when they are
unconscious. As Shakespeare observed in The Tempest, no prisons are
more confining than the ones of which we are unaware.
The child's internalization of his or her mother becomes the tem-
plate which all other relationships replicate or struggle to transcend. It
sounds terribly reductionistic to us, deterministic even, to speak of such
profound and pervasive influence, but if one looks long enough, and

deeply enough, one finds always the trace of the parent-child dyad
informing the choice, strategies, and often outcomes of later relation-
ships. Even the compensatory fantasy that one is choosing the opposite
of one's parental imago still shows one to be defined by the original
experience. How much of ourselves do we ever choose? Rilke raises the
same question.
But did he begin himself?

Mother, you made his small self;
For you he was new...
And you bestowed on him friendly eyes,
and protected him from things foreign.
One could offer an ad hominem analysis of Rilke's emphasis on the

power of this primal, maternal matrix, and indeed, he did suffer from
a powerfully negative mother complex. O n a separate occasion he
wrote,
Ah, woe is me, my mother rends me.

Then I put stone upon stone around me
And stood there like a little house,
Around which day moved magnificently,
Ever alone.
Now comes my mother, comes and rends me.
Although Rilke once confessed that he did not love his mother, his treat-
ment of the mother in the third elegy is benign, even laudatory. A n d
he is not wrong in his assertion of this primal power of the mother, for
she is the immediate, immanent experience of life and of relationship,
for good or ill, and she is the mediator with the larger world outside.
As an analyst, I am obliged to agree with his conclusion that the power
of the mother experience, for men and for women, is, generally speak-
ing, the single greatest psychological influence in our lives.
The mother depicted in this elegy is protective rather than devour-
ing. When the child's room is full of shadows and sounds at night and
his terror rises to fill that vast space, which "you made harmless." He
writes that "there wasn't a night-noise your smile could not assuage, as
if your omniscience had already known such sounds."
As the mediatrix with the world, the mother's fears, unlived life, and
projected desires become part of the internal mythology of the child.
His or her conduct of adult life, psychology, theology, and relationships
will all seek either to confirm, to compensate for, or to heal the myth-
ologems implicit in this first, primal relationship. Jung agreed that
Freud's Oedipal complex was universal but had as its motive not sexual
congress but immersion in the all-protective, all-nurturing source,
against which only the hero's journey could overthrow the seductive
power of such satiety. As Jung explains, the child "tears himself away
from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to
his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of
him, yet he carries the enemy within himself—a deadly longing for the
abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down into
the realm of the Mothers." 7
No doubt Rilke used his transcendent aesthetic powers to escape that

devouring mother, but she was forever present in his intimate relation-
ships. That wise American poet Walt Whitman must have had a simi-
lar feeling when he wrote of a "Dark Mother" that always followed him.
Rilke acknowledges this awesome mediatorial and directive power:
"So tenderly powerful your presence as you stood by the bed, that his
Fate slid behind the wardrobe, and his stirring Future slipped into the
folds of the curtains."
Rilke's testimony to the power of such primal experience may seem
overstated to some. In both men and women, however, the deeply bur-
ied imprint of such experience constitutes a de facto mythology, by
which I mean a Weltanschauung, a set of values, an assemblage of be-
haviors and attitudes, and a propulsive power for reenactment. A l l sub-
sequent relationships begin in projection, move toward the transference
of such implicit mythologies, and unconsciously seek to replicate, com-
pensate for, or heal the first relationship. Anyone who works analyti-
cally will find this core truth in the heart of any serious analysis.
The internalization of the personal mother constitutes the personal
dimension, or what Jung called the "mother complex" of the child. The
word complex here is entirely neutral. It simply means the internaliza-

tion of a powerful experience which, affectively charged, has the capacity
to act autonomously when activated and, given its origin in the past,
tends to create repetitions—patterns based on the dynamics of its ori-
gin. We know how difficult it is simply to be in this moment, for this
moment is reflexively compared with other such moments, and the
psychic history of the person is dynamically present and invasive. Only
when we respond spontaneously or instinctually to an event are we in
the moment; most of the time, we are in history, for history is dynami-
cally within us. To think otherwise is the insidious ploy of the ego to
serve its fantasy of control.
Most women will testify that their male partners often engage with
them as they would their mother, seeking to please them, to control them,
or to avoid them. Men cannot help but have the mother imago activated
when in the presence of intimate relationship. And the power which the
mother held in his life floods him, unconsciously, and sets in motion
the protective motives which confound his partner. He does not think
of her as his mother, but the historically generated complex is blind to
the present and floods this moment with the mythologems of origins.
Yet even the personal mother is as a fragment floating on a vast sea.
Without knowing anything of Jung's conceptualization of the collec-
tive unconscious, Rilke intuits that we all are moved by formative forces
which lie beneath personal history. Jung spoke of the longing to be
sucked down into "the realm of the Mothers." His capitalization of the
maternal bespeaks more an archetypal imago than personal complex.
As the child sleeps, under the embracing care of his Mother, Rilke con-
tinues, "he seemed protected . . . but inside who could divert the an-
cestral floods within him?"
Inside him, "the ancestral floods." What floods, what origin? What
secret sources antedate the personal mother who has been the perva-
sive presence from the moment of his birth? Jung suggested that every
complex has its archetypal root reaching down into our prehistories.
In each affectively charged complex, which is a personal experience,
there is a substratum—our instinctual, animal nature, which is inher-
ited by the species and is our grounding in the Great Mother arche-
type. In this most transient condition of mortality there are webs of
programmed tissues and autonomous energies which move us to
rhythms not consciously ours. Who or what invents our dreams, our
religions, our patterned choices? What powers move us to reproduce,
to build civilization, to long for meaning? These are the gods, namely,
the archetypal powers which are more ancient than we can imagine.
These powers shape us. As Rilke continues, "he was subsumed, en-
meshed, in the spreading web of inner events, with paradigms of veg-
etal and animal forms."
We all know those "vegetal and animal forms" and have always
known them. They were more immediate to us when we were children.
We knew they lived, for they stalked our dreams and were glimpsed in
our nursery rhymes and bedtime stories. But we learned to distance
them and build the protective walls of ego to defend ourselves against
them. Occasionally the poet will remind us of these animal forms,
whether outer or inner, as Yeats does in his poem "Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen": " N o w days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides
upon sleep." 8
Still, these abysses are not just terrifying; they are also our home.
We come thence, and we carry such unconscious chasms wherever we
go. Rilke imagines as well that the child can love this world within,
embrace it, and be one with his nature: " O h how he gave himself over—
loved his inner wilderness, the primal wood, amid whose density his
heart stood light-green."
His heart is light and green, the color of the Great Mother, and light-
green, for it rests lightly in the bosom of its true home. Again, we see
the personification of the archetypal imagination which allows us
momentary access to such mysteries. These divine powers cannot be
named or contained, but they can be apprehended by virtue of the
mediating symbol.
When one is in the presence of this archetypal field, one is full of
terror like the biblical prophet who fears the Lord. But this fear is more
accurately awe. Existentialism reminds us that the abyss is our home,
and our freedom is found in embracing that abyss which we also carry
within. Rilke imagines that the child, when one with his own nature,
leaves "his ancestral roots, and goes out into the primal source where
his tiny birth was already transcended."
The child we were, the child we carry still, is the carrier of ancient

energies. Recall that it is the energy which is real, not the husk which
holds it for a time and then releases it to seek other incarnations. The
source to which Rilke alludes may be called God or nature or, more
adequately, the Mystery, but we are its carriers. This little incarnation
we call our lives is but the vehicle for a larger journey which divinity
makes through us. Jung's idea of individuation is not in service to the
narcissistic inflation of the ego; it is a humbling assumption of the task
which fate has assigned to us. We are asked to become the individual
in order that our small portion of the unfolding of the divine may be
achieved. To flag or fail in that task is to injure God.
So, in his natural, instinctual self, the child is comfortable with those
deep places where later ego will fear to tread. Rilke describes this de-
scent into our own nature: "Lovingly, he descends into the ancestral
blood, to canyons where the Frightful may be found, turgid with Fa-
thers, where even Terror knew him, winked at him."
Several matters of note are found here. Drawn by love, the unfet-
tered eros of nature naturing, becoming itself, the child visits the places
where, according to my translation, he swims in the primal blood, where
the feared presence is faced and is no longer feared. Once in Zurich,
just before I spent my first internship on a locked psychiatric ward, I
expressed my beginner's apprehension. M y analyst replied, "When you
have faced your terrors, the demons of others won't terrify you." Im-
mediately I knew the wisdom of his remark and realized I feared less
the violence there than the loss of the tether to comfortable sanity. If I
could let go of that tether, I would be able to be present to those "ani-
mal forms" that haunted the patients and treat them as familiar.
One puzzling note arises with Rilke's depiction of the primal ravine
as glutted with the fathers. This puzzle may be his acknowledgment of
the inaccessibility of the father energy to help him compensate for the
power of that devouring mother, or it may be that the "fathers" here
represent the telluric powers of old Chronos, generative but destruc-
tive, and in time plowed under as well. Time is unkindly even to gods.
We take special note of how the Fearful seems to know the youth,
and winks at him. We recall that the etymology of numinous suggests
something which is nodding toward us—something that seeks us,
knows us, solicits our mindfulness, and invites our complicity. H o w

many times have we had dream figures whom we do not know con-
sciously but feel we somehow know, or those anonymous figures who
seem to know us? We recall Jung's subjective, synthetic approach to
dreams and his idea that the various parts of the dream, the personi-
fied energies, are parts of us. We are led to conclude that there is some
superordinate reality, what Jung called the Self, which knows us, cre-
ates the dream, and synthesizes so many disparate elements into a dra-
matic whole. When we are in the presence of that large wisdom, such
as when we revere and dialogue with our dreams, we are in the pres-
ence of the transcendent whose name and nature are unknown but
whose reality is palpable. Who could doubt the presence of the gods
when one has been vouchsafed visions of eternity through the linea-
ments of the literal? Or as Rilke muses, "Why should he not love what
looked lovingly at him?"
How could we not love that which nods at us and beckons us to be
restored to wholeness? Even before his mother, he had loved this world,
this cosmos from which he sprung, "long before, while you carried him
in the womb, that dissolved the cosmos, which wafted the embryo so
lightly."
Surely the deepest wound of this world we inhabit is to feel uprooted
from our divine beginning. It is one thing to wander as a hungry spirit,
as we do; it is something worse to have forgotten that we carry the sa-
cred energy within us, and are present to it, wheresoever we are. As
transient beings we are nonetheless the carriers of the eternal. How
powerful is Rilke's endorsement of this journey: "See, we do not love
as the flowers do, for a single year, for a timeless liquor flows through
our arms."
As hackneyed as the word love is, as jaded as the word God or the
phrase "have a nice day," we are still obliged to use them. What Rilke is
calling love is surely the toughest, most resilient energy in the cosmos,
the energy which survives and is manifest in endlessly diverse ways to
all the senses. This love is the eros which seeks connection, the desire
which drives life in the face of the seductive terrors of the abyss. We err
to think such a force reserved for only one person, our magical part-
ner, our erotic Doppelgdnger. It is expended as well on "seething multi-
tudes" and "the fathers lying in our depths." All of this ancient drama

has preceded the pas de deux we call love, which our culture is driven
to both venerate and narrow to mere venery or sexual indulgence be-
cause it knows itself impoverished by the loss of the gods.
Thus, the beloved is the recipient, certainly, of powerful energies,
but how would she have surmised "what archaic hours you stir in your
lover" or "what feelings arise out of ancient being"? How deeply moved
would we be if we were to perceive such an ancient drama not only in
us but in the other as well? How much more could we love them if we
saw the invisible histories that moved in and through them? How could
we then lead them "nearer to Eden," that place of beginnings, depar-
tures, losses, and wistful reminiscences? What could we see in the other,
what mystery, what worthy history, would open up the glottal stops of
our hearts and allow us to bestow on them that which "vanquishes the
heavy nights"?
With Rilke we see the fine fusion of eros and logos, the deep yearn-
ing to connect with the delicate differentiation of language to summon,
to intimate, but not to define or close off. When we gloss this poem, as
I have, we have not understood it, or contained it, for it continues to
own us and remains elusive. One does not contain the divine. It mani-
fests, abides a while, and departs, leaving but a trace, through the arti-
facts of consciousness which sought to retain and possess it.
In this third elegy Rilke has summoned the highest, most mysteri-
ous energies, which we often subsume under the appellation love. As
Eros was a god, he was not to be defined. He nods at us, moves through
us, and then, at his whim, leaves us. He is not to be restrained, for he is
of the godly ones. Rilke's gift is to bring us to a place where Eros is
glimpsed, along with all the declivities in which he abides. We cannot
remain, but it is a great gift to have been afforded a moment there.
Why Are We Sojourners on This Earth?
In the ninth of his Duino Elegies, begun in 1912 but not concluded un-
til 1922, the year of Eliot's "The Waste Land," Rilke asks another i m -
mense question, namely, why are we here on this spinning earth?
The magnificent ninth elegy begins with the question, "Why?" Why
(46) A R C H E T Y P A L I M A G I N A T I O N
in this interlude of grace which we call our lives are we human? Human
beings, doomed to die, are cursed and/or blessed with consciousness,
yet cling fervently to their mortal fates. The word Frist often suggests
the notion of "grace," even in the ordinary sense of a grace period, a
moment of granted time. Grace we know is something given, some-
thing lent, not something earned. Dylan Thomas alluded to the same
gift of time in his famous poem "Fern H i l l , " where he notes that Time
allows us but "a few tuneful turnings / before the children, green and
golden, follow him out of grace." So we are here only a fleeting mo-
9
ment, graced by the gods, given consciousness (Promethean burden

as that is), yearning for love and for union, and tasked with limited
powers to transcend a certain fate. Why, then, are we here?
Not for happiness, Rilke concludes, which itself is so fleeting, so
uncertain, so unretainable. Nor for simple curiosity, though such has
led us to the depths of the oceans, to interstellar space, and to the ex-
ploration of our own labyrinthian minds. Nor simply as discipline for
the heart, for we know that the heart may grow sated, break in pain,
and prove as much the agent of trickery as our cunning and divided
minds.
Rilke comes to a stunning conclusion. We are here because "this fleet-
ing world" apparently needs us, we who are paradoxically, "the most
fleeting of all." Each of us is here to observe, to bear witness to all things,
if only once, and no more. This, our condition, too, is our task.
A n d we, also, only once. A n d never again. But to have been here
once, if only for this once, to have been on this earth once, seems
immutable. 10
We are here, he suggests, to complete some purpose in the cosmos, a

purpose which has nothing to do with our own will or hybris. We are
here to help creation by being the agent of its consciousness. This is an
idea that Jung also reached via a quite different route. In his controver-
sial work Answer to Job, Jung argued that Yahweh needed humans to
carry the task of His consciousness, His conscience, and His own evo-
lution." At first glance Jung's argument sounds preposterous, certainly
anthropocentric, and hybristic. Moreover, Jung's argumentative acu-
L I T E R A R Y I M A G I N I N G S (47)
men in Answer to Job would make a believer squirm. He shows the
contradictions in Yahweh's own statements; he demonstrates the lack
of moral development of those positions; and he cries out on behalf of
human suffering and injustice in questioning whether such a deity is
worthy of worship. Jung was no fool and later indicated that he wished
he had changed every reference to God to the god-imago. He knew well
enough to leave the arguments for God to the philosophers of religion
and the credos to persons of faith. He was more interested in showing
the evolution of human consciousness, which is what he meant by the
evolving god-imago. The imago Dei, he argued, tells us much about an
individual or a culture and very little about the Wholly Other.
Rilke is no fool either, and he asserts that our raison d'etre lies in
our capacity for growth as agents of consciousness. By each person
becoming more conscious, the cosmos gains consciousness.
But the capacity for consciousness is no sure thing. O f what, really,
can we become conscious? Isolated facts here and there, occasional
patterns, and rarely, deep intimations of the divine through dreams,
visions, art, and mythologies. We keep trying to catch and hold what
seems so fleeting, "we try to possess, to hold lightly in our simple hands,
with our stupefied gaze, our tongueless heart. Wishing to become it,
yet to whom may we pass it on? Though we long to hold on to it forever."
Our brains are feeble tools in the face of complexity and immen-
sity. Our sight is sated, our hearts rendered dumb and inarticulate. We
wish to merge with the flow, to become it, and it passes by us. A n d what
are we to do with what we perceive, to whom do we give it, that which
we can so scarcely retain? Without the tools of metaphor and symbol
we would have precious little to say, for they allow us to talk about that
about which we cannot talk.
A n d what can be taken with us into the darker kingdom? What sur-
vives us? We cannot, Rilke asserts, take with us what we saw. We can
take nothing which we have achieved here. What golden bough do we
have to allow us to visit that darker kingdom and return? We carry the
long lessons of love, the capacity to care about something or someone,
but even that may pass, and certainly the spinning planets and stately
stars are fixed in their orbits whether we raise a tumult or pass quietly
into nothingness. (Recall Edward Hirsch's lines cited earlier, "Stars are
( 48 ) A R C H E T Y P A L I M A G I N A T I O N
the white tears of nothingness. / Nothingness grieves over the disinte-
grating gods.")
Perhaps our place or vocation here is not unlike that of the moun-
tain traveler who returns to the valley and speaks the name of some
new flower seen, some gentian to bring as a souvenir and talisman of
the ascent taken. But the key here, Rilke says, is in the saying. Here he
echoes the Hebrew imagination in Genesis which analogizes the mys-
tery of creativity in God's capacity to speak. With the word spoken, the
thing arises out of chaos into being: "perhaps we are here in order to
speak, to pronounce house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree,
window—at most column, tower. But to speak, understand, oh to speak
more intensely than the things themselves could ever attain."
Our task is formidable and simple: to bear witness, to assist into
being, to help house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, and so on exist more
intensely than they would without us. In a letter written in 1925, Rilke
noted, "Even for our grandparents a 'house,' a 'well,' a familiar tower,
their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more intimate; almost ev-
erything was a vessel in which they found what is human and added to
the supply of what is human." To add to the supply of what is human
12
is our deepest destiny, which, amid death and transience, brings joy.
Here Rilke's exclamatory joy is contained in the O zu sagen, " O h to
speak!" What joy! Here Rilke echoes the secondary imagination of
which Coleridge wrote, the echo of the primal "I A m that I A m " of
Yahweh. Here we are co-creators with the Creator—humble servants,
but partners in creation itself. What a vocatus!
We who are most fleeting are summoned, nonetheless, to this call-
ing, a calling which transpires only in the passing moment but exists
for that moment. Perhaps the finest love poem I have ever seen was
written by Archibald MacLeish and takes its title and its cue from one
of Shakespeare's sonnets, " N o t Marble Nor Gilded Monuments."
Shakespeare, writing to his beloved, "the dark ladie" of the sonnets,
which were written at the time of plague in London, expresses the hope
that the immortality of his writing will grant continued life for these
two mortal lovers. MacLeish denies that his writing will grant any i m -
mortality to himself or the beloved.
/ will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women.
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the
mouths broken,
Look! it is there!' 3
For MacLeish the recognition utterance, more exclamation than descrip-

tion, bestows meaning on that existential moment and grants it deep-
ened being. For MacLeish, for Rilke, as for classical Buddhism, the past
is past and the future is not yet. Only this moment exists. As Rilke ex-
claims, "Here is the speakable moment; here is its home. Speak and bear
witness. While the Things themselves are slipping away more than ever."
Rilke capitalizes Things, not just because all nouns are capitalized
in German but because he wants to accord the things of our w o r l d —
the house, bridge, fountain, gate—mutual being and to celebrate that
being. We know even more than Rilke did of how evanescent the things
around us are. We live in a plastic, throwaway culture, a culture based
on momentary sensation and transient tastes. How much more i m -
portant for us, then, than in 1920, to affirm, to render what is real amidst
the fleeting moments and disappearing things. Through this affirma-
tion we come at last to Rilke's vision of why we are here. Put simply,
through the acts of consciousness, reverence, mindfulness, and speech,
we are here to praise. We, the most fleeting, bring meaning into the
world through the verbal venues of praise.
Between hammers, our heart persists, as does the tongue between

our teeth and still, persisting, praises.
Our vocatus is to praise and, by doing so, grant things deeper being
and bring consciousness to them. This is very consistent with Jung's
idea of the place of consciousness and our task here.
In Jung's view, humanity is a partner in the continuing incarnation
of Being. Being springs forth from the Mystery, from inexplicable cos-
mic energies—who among us can understand the miraculous nature
of everyday life, or of a baby, or of the quantum dynamics of the atom?
But through the act of consciousness, mindfulness, or what Rilke calls
praise, we bring meaning to those transient moments. As Jung writes,
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to
kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." He also writes of that
partnership with the Divine which brings our spiritual task: "The myth
of the necessary incarnation of G o d . . . can be understood as man's
creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self,
the wholeness of his personality... That is the g o a l . . . which fits man
meaningfully into the scheme of creation and at the same time confers
meaning upon it." 14
Jung's use of the idea of myth is clear enough as an expression of

dramatically rendered values which activate and direct the energies of
the soul, but such a phrase as "the necessary incarnation of G o d " may
strike us as strange. The name and nature of the Divine remain
shrouded in mystery, of course, and we may only glimpse the invisible
when it momentarily inhabits the visible world. What passes unnoticed
is not unreal, but it depends on human consciousness to bring it full
identity. To this partnership with the invisible world we bring recogni-
tion. The Mystery confers being, but the human saying confers mean-
ing. The world does not mean; it is. We are the organisms of meaning
and make our contribution through the gift of consciousness.
Rilke could have stopped the ninth elegy with this superlative i n -
sight, but he goes further. Throughout the Duino Elegieshe invokes an
angel, in the same way in which Milton invoked the "heavenly muse"
or Plato, the daimon. Rilke asks us to "praise this world to the angel."
We are asked to bring praise to the cosmos. We cannot bring the gift of
understanding, for there is much which eludes our petty intelligence,
nor can we bring only large emotion, for there is much which exceeds
our capacity. Rather we are asked to tell the angel of the simple places
and sights we have seen, to speak of "the rope-maker in Rome or the
potter along the Nile," to show "how blessed the Thing can be, and how
guileless." These unremarkable events are most remarkable, for they
summon mere Things up and out of the flux into consciousness, wherein
they take on enlarged destiny. Remember, Rilke has argued that these
transient Things need us for deeper being than they are otherwise ca-
pable: "And these transient Things know you are praising them. They,
most fleeting, look to us, the most fleeting of all, for redemption."
L I T E R A R Y I M A G I N I N G S ( 51 )
In this paradox of being, with the transience of all things, the soul
longs for permanence. However momentary this life we lead, Rilke and
Jung suggest that the vocation of naming, of praising, of becoming
conscious plays an immense role in the unfolding of the cosmos. These
things around us look to us for deliverance from obscurity, from oblo-
quy, from oblivion.
Like the ascending tones of Wagner's "Liebestod," which stretch to-
ward eternity, Rilke takes this task one step further in his conclusion.
Our sacred vocation is to redeem the earth: "Earth, is this not what you
desire, invisibly... ? Is not transformation your most urgent yearning?"
The transformation of the earth comes from the engagement with
consciousness whereby the mysterious stuff of life is given a spiritual
identity through the experience of meaning. Our participation in this
partnership is homeopathic, for underneath material appearances, the
same divine energies course through us. That energy brings life, to
which our consciousness brings meaning.
Yet we and the earth are part of a single reality. A n d speaking to this
ever-evolving earth, Rilke says: " O h believe me, you do not need your
Springtimes to vanquish me again, for one, only one surfeits the blood.
Namelessly, from the beginning, I have been yours. You are always right,
and your deepest truth is intimate Death."
We can imagine a springtime, with the thrust of life from the heavy
earth, but can we imagine no observant consciousness to praise it? We
know what it means to drive through the spring countryside and see
the red and blue bursts of wildflowers. They will be there with or with-
out us, but it was our consciousness which named them Indian paint-
brush and bluebonnets.
But Rilke turns the matter one step further in suggesting that death
is a holy inspiration and our most intimate companion. Precisely be-
cause our moments are few and finite, precisely because consciousness
is so easily annihilated, the moments of meaning which we bring to
this place are all the more precious. It is death which makes meaning
possible, for without it there would be only endless repetition and
meaningless choice. With mortality, choice takes on significance and
we are obliged to discern what matters. In a letter written in 1923 Rilke
clarifies,
I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life
so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we invol-
untarily come to include, and to love death t o o . . . . Only because
we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it be-
come more and more a stranger to us; and because we have kept it
a stranger, it has become our enemy.... [Death is] our friend pre-
cisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to be-
ing here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. 15
From Greek mythology we recall Tithonus, who was granted immor-

tality, found it a boring burden, and went to the gods to plead that his
mortality might be restored. As a blessing, they granted him the power
to die and, with that power, the capacity, indeed, the necessity for,
meaning. So Death, which accompanies the baby's cry, which stands
watching at our side, and whose imperatives none can deny, requires
us to become conscious, to become creatures of choice. We have been
granted mortality that we might have meaning, and have it abundantly.
Rilke concludes this mighty ninth symphony of praise by affirming
the power of this moment, this radical experience of presence. "Look,
I am living!" he exclaims. Not out of the childhood past, nor the future
which may or may not be, but out of this moment. Just as MacLeish
wrote that "the shape of a leaf lay in your h a i r . . . Look! it is there!", so
Rilke celebrates this moment where "overwhelming Being floods my
heart." This moment, this fleeting moment, is so full, and the more so
because it is fleeting. This fate we have, to be mortal beings and to be
conscious of that mortality, also begets our destiny, which is to bring
meaning into the world, to create a life and a sensibility for which only
the word praise may suffice.
On the Naming of the Gods 16
Unlike so much of modern psychology, which has abrogated its

immense responsibility to be present to the large issues of soul and
meaning and which has reduced humanity to behaviors, cognitions, and
biochemical drives, Rilke and Jung dared to address the large questions.
What can be larger for us than love, death, and the divine? We see that
Jung and Rilke approach such mysteries with reverence, a desire to know,
an awareness of limitations, and, fortunately, with a huge imaginative
power. To turn away from these large concerns is the failure of nerve; to
take them on is what restores us to our dignity and our destiny.
The task of the poet, and the depth psychologist, is to bring us into
proximity with the sacred. The sacred is only knowable through expe-
rience and then made meaningful and communicated by the agencies
of metaphor and symbol. Sometimes the sacred is remarkable for its
absence, sometimes for its anarchic quality, sometimes for its presence
beneath the surface of ordinary experience. For Rilke the naming of
"house," "tree," and "fountain," was a holy event if sensibility was open
to depth. There are lines by the German poet Friedrich Holderlin,
whom Jung frequently cited: " G o d is near but difficult to grasp, but
where danger lies, from there, too, deliverance emerges." A n d it is that
17
paradox that St. Augustine confessed where we, "unlovely," rush "heed-
lessly among the things of beauty," where the divine is with us, but we
are not with the divine. It is the time of the Great In-Between, the
18
space between Words. As Heidegger describes this spiritual interreg-

num of modernism: "It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the
god that is coming. It is the time of need, because it lies under a double
lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the
Not-yet of the god that is coming." 19
Poetry is not affectation then, nor aesthetic sleight of hand, but a

mediation between humanity and the numinous. Jung makes the poet's
contribution clear: "Poets are the first in their time to divine the darkly
moving, mysterious currents, and to express them according to the lim-
its of their capacity in more or less speaking symbols. They make
known, like true prophets, the deep motions of the collective uncon-
scious, 'the will of G o d ' . . . which, in the course of time, must inevita-
bly come to the surface as a general phenomenon." 20
Just as the dream synthesizes materials unknown to consciousness,

and the intuitive function accesses dimensions of reality beyond
thought and sensation, so the poetic sensibility discerns the deepest
need and brings forth images to speak the unspeakable, and to render
the invisible world accessible.
Reference to a few of Rilke's shorter poems may illustrate this ca-
pacity of the archetypal imagination to "name the gods" by providing
images which link us once again to the numinous.
J Find You in All These Things
I find You in all these things,

to which I am a brother in all,
in which minuscule seed you minutely hide yourself
and in the Great, you greatly reveal yourself.
This wondrous game ofpower

which unfolds itself in submission:
stretching through the roots, thickening in the trunks,
and resurrecting through the treetops. ' 2
In the original Rilke uses the lowercase dich (you rather than You), and
though one may translate that word as Lord, Rilke may be even more
subtle. He does not name this god directly, though we sense the godly
coursing through nature. All things pulse with this life; in the dormant
seed the divine sleeps; and through the vastness the Vast reveals itself.
In this manifestation of power Rilke finds the paradox of submission.
The highest is found in the lowest root, and he distantly alludes to the
submission of Christ on the tree of Golgotha, the humble servant who
rises from the dead.
While Rilke could not personally express a Christian credo, he could
appeal to that tradition and certainly did evoke the archetypal pattern
of the vegetative god which runs through Adonis to Tammuz to Osiris
to Dionysus to Christ. Under the weight of institutions, under the en-
crustation of dogma and ritual, Rilke recovers wonder and reinstitutes
the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus: that things above are copies of
things below and through the archetypal image the gods bring the time-
less into our time.
Rilke lived in the time between the no-more and the not-yet. As a
poet he knew that we always live in the space between words, but as a
modern he also knew that we live in the space between Words. His poem
"Lament" expresses the sense of loss and the pathos of longing which
we all feel: "Everything is far and long gone by. I think that the star glit-
tering above me has been dead for a million years." 22
The transient things of our lives have left us: places, friends, loved
ones. Upon what do we place our faith, from what metaphysical bench-
mark may we find our place, chart our course? Even the star above us
has long ago blinked off and the distance is so vast the news has not yet
reached us. It is noteworthy that our word desire refers to the mariner's
star by which a course is charted. The loss of the guiding star means
we are unable to find the shore we seek. Rilke says that he would like to
"step out of my heart," but he cannot sacrifice his spiritual pain lest he
lose who he is in the process. He says he "would like to pray," but to
whom? As he looks through the vast night with all its dark holes wait-
ing to suck us i n , he nonetheless believes that one of those stars still
flames alive. He concludes: "I believe I know which one alone endures,
which one, at the end of its rays, still stands like a White City." 23
What a wonderful rendering of the modernist condition—the sense

of a past unretrievable, a future unimaginable, and the need to continue
one's journey without guidance. What a wonderful summons to the
existential risk and trust in the supportive cosmos in his evocation of
that white city which stands, still, at the end of its infinitely long beam.
In the lyric "Autumn," Rilke nominates not only a season of the soil
but a season of the soul as well. This seems fitting, since we live in the
waning days of some large history but cannot yet glimpse the rebirth
which will spring forth later. He analogizes the falling autumnal leaves
with the fading of distant gardens in the sky. The loss is Edenic, taking
from us not only the recent summer but also the fabled garden of in-
nocence. A n d through the cosmic night the earth, too, is falling:
All of us are falling. See this hand now fall.

And now see the others; it is part of all.
And still there is one who in his hands gently

Holds this falling endlessly. 24
Notice that Rilke does not name this god. It is not Baal, or Yahweh, or
any of the million deities which have been reified and have disappeared
from this planet. He anthropomorphizes this power through the i m -
age of gentle hands, hands which hold us eternally, even as we fall
through time and space. Naming the god is to define and control it.
Rilke is a most religious poet for he is able to evoke the divine, inti-
mate the numinous, and yet allow it to remain as it is—mysterious,
elusive, Other.
And for the last example, I turn to the poem which expresses its thesis
in its first line: " N o w is the time when the Gods emerge / from occu-
pied Things." As we have seen before, the Things of this world are
25
not inanimate to the poet; each throbs with life and carries the imprint
of the gods on its frail form. We recall Jung ascribing divinity to those
events which crossed his path and violently overturned ego's intent,
and Rilke asserts that they "overthrew every wall in my house." It is 26
often difficult to accept that the Divine Will may not be concordant
with our own, that the path for which we are intended is not that which
we would have chosen. I recall an analyst in Zurich asking which mem-
ber of our small group had chosen to be there; no one replied. Who, he
asked, had no choice but to be there, and all nodded assent.
Not only do we flee the disruptive powers of the gods, we tend to
shun the invitation to enlargement which such encounters invite. In
every visitation to the swamplands of the soul there is a task for the
enlargement of consciousness, whether we will it or not. A n d Jung re-
minded us to flee these invitations at our peril. Oedipus, who was the
smartest man in Thebes, knew not himself, and that of which he was
unconscious led to the fulfillment of the oracles. "When an inner situ-
ation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate," Jung writes.
Elsewhere he argues that genuine encounters with the Self, or with the
gods, as Rilke would have it, are usually suffered as defeats by the ego. 27
Rilke evokes those gods, calls forth the unnameable ones: " O h you
Gods, who once came often, but now slumber in Things." 28
For the animistic world of our ancestors, nature was charged with
soul-stuff. The trees, the streams, the animal life was divinity itself, in
all its manifold forms—fearful, joyous, always profound. In de-souling
nature, we gained greater manipulation of the material world, but at
the loss of meaningful relation to it. Rilke knows that the gods have not
left; they have gone underground and wait to be resummoned from the
world of Things: "Again it is your rebirth, Gods. We only repeat things.
But you are the primal source. The world arises from you, and these
beginnings glisten through the crevices of all our failures." 29
The recovery of spirituality in our time will not likely come from
the revivication of someone else's experience, for experience is seldom
if ever transferred. It will come through our capacity to open to radi-
cal experience (from the word radix, or "root" experience), whether
through our encounters with nature, each other, or the insurgencies
of our own psyches. Rilke reminds us that the gods alone are the source
of the renewal of meaning. Recall that we are using the word gods here
to describe those images which rise spontaneously out of depth en-
counters. Whatever metaphysical status they may have is another ques-
tion, but that they are psychologically compelling is irrefragable. Our
failure is the failure of the imagination. Racism or bigotry is the failure
of imagination, the power to image the world which the Other em-
bodies. Our failure is to have traded the experience of the divine for
the fantasy of control.
This decision, made centuries ago, and reinformed by most contem-
porary theologies and all ego-based psychologies, required the gods to
go underground and remain within our unconscious, to emerge in
projections, addictions, and sociopathies. But the gods are not dead.
Nietzsche was, like Rilke, a man of radical faith when in the nineteenth
century he announced the death of God. He cared enough about the
questions of meaning to denounce the encapsulation of the gods in
sterile rite and dogma. But he knew that the vitality of the divine was
to be found elsewhere. He knew the truth of those lines of Yeats: "What-
ever flames upon the night / Man's own resinous heart has fed." 30
Through the powers of the archetypal imagination, allied with logos,

which brings consciousness, such philosophers and poets have kept the
gods alive by retaining a respectful humility before the Mystery, and
by finding images whose power brings us into proximity with the
numinous and compels a new encounter with the divine.
CHAPTER 3
c^ncamational (^maqinin^s
The Painter's Eye on Eternity
Primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the cur-

tain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered
world and allows a glimpse into the unfathomable abyss
of the unborn and of things yet to be. Is it a vision of
other worlds, or of the darkness of the spirit, or of the
primal beginnings of the human psyche?
— C . G. Jung
A Critical Place to Stand
beyond our grasp. The late-nineteenth-century art critic Walter Pater
once observed that all art aspires to the condition of music. I believe
he meant by this that music is an inherent, natural experience which
has no content per se, that is, denotated meaning, though it does have
form, rhythm, and progression. By aspiring to the condition of music,
art then transcends the tyranny of ideology, the popularity of an idea,
or the need to understand it. As that great American philosopher Louis
Armstrong once observed, if you have to have jazz explained to you,
you will never know what it means.
Nonetheless, in aspiring to the condition of music, the arts inevita-
bly employ "language" that is generally referential, or connotative, and
motifs that are identifiable by consciousness. I should like to summa-
rize briefly the perspectives and the pitfalls of any analysis of the arts.
A R T AS I D E A
Many forms of art employ an idea, as we just saw in Rilke's contempla-

tion of love and death. But we do not read a work of art to get a new
idea. The idea of a novel or play will simply come down to a truism:
"we love and are betrayed," or "we long for meaning," or " i n the end we
die." As Hemingway once observed, if the hero does not die in the end,
the author simply did not finish the story. A n d what if the idea that
fuels a work of art is one with which we disagree? Are we then to throw
the entire work away? If one is not moved to ideological and affective
compliance with medieval Catholicism, should Dante's Commedia be
discarded? Surely there is more to a work of art than the idea which
spawned it, an idea which may itself be commonplace, even in an origi-
nal aesthetic expression.
A R T AS F O R M
I was educated in the era of the New Criticism, which argued that the idea
of a work of art was essentially irrelevant and that the work manifests a
series of structures, rhetorics, and agencies such as metaphor, symbol, or
irony. The analysis of the work of art was essentially the analysis of the
craft of art, irrespective of its cultural Sitz im Leben or its ideology. In these
later days of deconstructionism we are told that the work of art is always
a Rorschach reflection of its creator, inevitably revealing class, gender, and
other biases. In neither approach to the arts do we find ourselves address-
ing why we are moved by art or how it deepens our journey.
A R T AS R E L A T I O N S H I P T O N A T U R E
As one examines the history of the arts, visual, literary, and musical,
over the last two centuries, one sees a progressive decline in the i m -
portance of ideology for sure, but even more of a shift in our relation-
ship to nature. Consider painting, for example. In the early nineteenth
century Jacques Louis David might still be summoned to depict a his-
toric event, such as the crowning of Napoleon. The Barbizon school
certainly depicted the richness of nature, but one begins to see a loos-
ening of the line and a growing fuzziness of color in those forests and
fields. In Joseph Turner we see the anticipation of impressionism.
For the impressionists, the object is no longer paramount. Light is
their subject, light as it is reflected and refracted from surfaces—water,
lilies, colorful attire. Quickly they are followed by the expressionists,
whose painting celebrated the emotions occasioned by their subjects;
the pointillists, who see even the light as a series of luminous points;
the cubists, who see constituent shapes only, interesting in and for
themselves; the vorticists, who celebrate energy itself; and the abstract-
ionists, in whose art the object disappears altogether. This history of
modern art shows that art progressively becomes the subject of art. The
object, whose representation may be better approached by photog-
raphy, ceases to be the subject. There has been, in addition, the disso-
lution of the metaphysical grounding of objects from the combined
perspectives of Kant and quantum physics.
A R T AS P S Y C H E ' S C H I L D
M y first exposure to the psychological criticism of art came from the

neo-Freudians, and I found their work to be reductionistic and in ser-
vice to privileged ideologies. Much Jungian criticism has suffered from
the same reductionism. Even when Jung himself ventured into the criti-
cism of art, as in his essays on Joyce's Ulysses and Picasso, he might better
have not written at all.
When asked the question " O n what critical ground are we to stand?",
I feel obliged to say that I value the partial truths of virtually every criti-
cal approach there is. However, when I reflect on why I have valued psy-
chology but loved art, why I find the arts a more reliable guide to human
history, behavior, and hidden motive than may be found in books of
psychology, I am driven to confess a personal bias. I find myself treasur-
ing that which stirs my imagination, moves me deeply, and opens me to
enlarged vision, no matter how or in what fashion this may be done.
When we are in the presence of art that does all these things, we find, in
James Hillman's words, "There is no end to depth, and all things become
soul." 1 find myself treasuring that art which brings me into proximity
1
with the gods. Here again, Hillman reminds us what is meant by that
term gods: "In archetypal psychology gods are imagined . . . They are
formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as
numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which
the soul participates." 2
I N C A R N A T I O N A L I M A G I N I N G S ( 6l )
So, what moves us is the encounter with the depths, with the godly,
whether consciously processed or not. A n d what moves us most deeply
is something which we are also, otherwise we remain indifferent to it.
The principle of resonance is critical here, for resonance tells us what
is true for us, or what moves us. Resonance is not created by an act of
will; it is experienced autonomously, the stirring of "like to like," the
thrum of the tuning fork inside of us. Such experience, as Plato noted
long ago in his dialogue called The Meno, is always re-cognition, the
re-membering of some lost wholeness as we encounter its numinous
parts. This critical place to stand, that all art is psyche's child, is itself
a metaphor, of course, but it acknowledges the power of the arche-
typal imagination to move us and to bring us into proximity with our
source. Once again, Hillman: "Within the metaphorical perspective,
within the imaginal field, nothing is more sure than the soul's own
activity.... Thus the soul finds psyche everywhere, recognizes itself in
all things, all things providing psychological reflection. A n d the soul
accepts itself in the mythical enactments as one more such metaphor.
More real than itself, more ultimate than its psychic metaphor, there
is nothing." 3
In sum, our critical place on which to stand depends itself on meta-

phor. To recall that all standpoints are metaphors is to be saved from
literalism, from ideological idolatry, and from the fundamentalism of
that psychosis which confuses objects with their names. The stand-
point, then, is the metaphor of soul which allows us to be moved by
the gods, those powers who are themselves metaphors. Retaining our
ability to reflect on metaphor allows us to accept the autonomy of the
mysteries and to remain open to their unpredictable visitations. So, all
we can say in the presence of art which moves us is that we have been
visited by the gods, with metaphor as the tangible trace of the encounter.
The Metarealism of Meaning
In speaking on several occasions to the Richmond, Virginia, Jungian

society, I have had the privilege of staying in the home of Nancy Witt,
one of the group's founders, in Ashland, Virginia. Nancy lives in a nine-
teenth-century mill, over a stream and a waterwheel, beside a pond, in
some of the most historic land of our nation.
When I first visited Richmond and walked into that mill, I was
stunned by the thirty-plus paintings that line the spacious walls of two
floors and create not only a museum effect but also a sanctuary for
meditation and reflection. Nancy has created a body of work over the
last twenty-some years which incarnates a deeply religious and arche-
typal vision of eternity. Her favorite critical review came from an un-
lettered man who was helping unload her paintings for display at a
conference in New Hampshire. This hotel worker went about and gath-
ered other employees, and she overheard him say to them, "Come, you
have to see these paintings. They are religious!" So, I say to you, come
see these paintings; they are religious.
We are all familiar with the moment when painting discovered psy-
choanalysis and produced surrealism. I have always been drawn to the
work of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali. Although we may not pro-
fess to understand their work, the art speaks to that part of our souls
whence our dreams emanate. Within the painter's frame, familiar ob-
jects are melted, dis-located, or distorted into affectively charged states.
We will be just as comfortable or uncomfortable with their work as we
are with our own dream life. The capacity of the ego to accept ambi-
guity is central to emotional maturity. In fact, how we can hold what I
call the triple A's—ambiguity, ambivalence, and anxiety—in tension is
a test of our psychic strength, which can even be reflected in our aes-
thetic tastes. Those who say, "I know what I like," are really saying, "I
like what I know." Thus, the surrealists are celebrated because we all
intuit that they are on to something, that they are reflecting something
very deep within our time and our psyches, even as they are ridiculed,
even reviled, as a means of keeping their visitations to the underworld
at a safe distance.
Nancy Witt describes herself as a "metarealist," however. Perhaps the
best way to understand this term is to think of Kafka, that compatriot
of Rilke, who, with his strange parabolic stories, novels, and aphorisms,
stood, according to Auden, in relationship to our troubled times as
Dante stood as the chief visionary of his. When you think of Kafka's
stories, they are eminently ratiocinative and realistic, once you accept
I N C A R N A T I O N A L I M A G I N I N G S ( 63 )
an emotional premise. For example, in "Metamorphosis," once we ac-
cept that Gregor Samsa can be transformed into an insect, a metaphor
for radical depersonalization, all else flows logically and sequentially.
Or once we accept that we may be guilty without having done anything,
that life is neither fair nor rational, then we may share Joseph K.'s search
for clarity and justice with both sympathy and detachment.
Kafka, in my view, is a metarealist, for he takes ordinary events and
turns them ever so slightly so that we are obliged to question what real-
ity may be. Often we are left in the position of not knowing what the
reality may be, for it has been called into profound question. The familiar
lens through which we see the world has been turned a few degrees, and
while the world remains recognizable, it is no longer familiar, safe, or
predictable. While the impact of Kafka's vision was often disturbing,
even chilling, it was in fact exceeded by the surrealism of European his-
tory in the twentieth century.
Nancy Witt's metarealism has to do with opening our eyes to see
through the ordinary phenomenal world into the epiphanic world, that
is, the world of revelatory vision. In this sense she is like Blake as well—
one who said that while many saw only a ball of gold in the sky, he saw
the Lord God Almighty and heard celestial choirs.
Metarealism is an expression of primordial experience which then
runs through the aesthetic alembic of the artist and thereby is ordered.
But it arises out of a place which may be disordered and chaotic, which
bespeaks the wild precincts of nature. The rending of the curtain al-
lows us to see that, behind the curtain, there is another world of ap-
pearances, and behind that another world as well. One who is drawn
to do this work has no choice, actually, for as Jung writes, "for all the
freedom of [the artist's] life and the clarity of his thought, he is every-
where hemmed around and prevailed upon by the Unconscious, the
mysterious god within him, so that ideas flow to him—he knows not
whence, he is driven to work and create—he knows not to what end,
and is mastered by an impulse for constant growth and development—
he knows not whither." 4
Nancy labors in her studio every day but Sunday from at least
9:00 A . M . to 5:00 P . M . Why? Because she has to. She told me that she plans
to work in this way until she dies because there is so little time and so
many images are clamoring for her attention. She told me that very
rarely has she begun a painting with an idea in mind. More often she
has simply been drawn to an object and then she begins to see through
the object to the worlds behind it. Or she has a certain "feeling state"
and looks for images which will somehow incarnate that state.
I talked once with the late metarealistic painter Frank Howell,
whose heritage was both Sioux and Anglo. He said that his best work
seemed to come from those moments when some force within the
canvas that wanted to come forth nudged aside his original idea. When
he was able to let go of the ego's idea and give form and color to the
emergent energy, he found those were the paintings which most spoke
to other people. When I suggested that he was at those moments the
vehicle of the archetypal imagination, he said that concept had no
meaning to h i m . As Jung suggested, the artist is prevailed upon by
the unconscious, and ideas flow to h i m or her from the Mysterious
Other. He or she is a person driven by the gods to work, worry, and
joy in the creative act.
The sculptor Henry Moore once observed of his decades of creativ-
ity that he had a passion so great that he could not chip it all away. When
we recall that passio is Latin for "suffering," we understand the suffer-
ing which is implicit in all creativity. Moreover, the artist is mastered
by his or her own need for personal growth, the growth which comes
when we attend our individuation imperative. We are forever being
surprised by what lies behind the next developmental door. A n d we
are often obliged to go to places we would rather not, but to which some
larger power insists we go.
So, Nancy paints every day, all day, producing a new large painting
about once a month. She could be watching television, or shopping,
but she chooses to be with her muse and to create.
OPENING: R E A L I T Y ' S R E N T C U R T A I N
In this first painting, titled Opening, we see our definitions of reality

opened as a curtain is opened. We see what appears conventional: a
landscape with earth, and hills, and clouds. But in the newly opened
center we glimpse the Mare nostrum, the sea as the primal symbol of
the unconscious itself, trackless, unfathomable, and omnipresent. A n d
I N C A R N A T I O N A L I M A G I N I N G S (65)
Figure 1. O p e n i n g . 1978. Oil on linen. 30" x 40".
are those the artist's feet, her standpoint, at the bottom of the paint-
ing? Is the ground upon which we stand ever firm, fixed, and reliable?
A n d whose hands pull aside the fabric of reality? We are often moved
by such invisible powers whether we know it or not. Rilke mused on
how lovers are moved by deep forces not their own: "Upon what i n -
strument have we been strung? / A n d in the hands of what musician
are we held?" 5
Of this painting Nancy wrote, "when I don't have a clear idea of what
wants to be painted, I will frequently paint a sky that appeals to me
over water. Usually right at the shoreline, at the edge—where water and
land meet—I find that if I watch there long enough something will
appear. It's where consciousness and the unconscious meet." 6
This description of the creative process might be called a form of

active imagination. This technique so common to Jungian parlance is
still often misunderstood. Jung did not mean free association, medita-
tion, or guided imagery. Active imagination needs to be understood
literally as the activation of the image, a technique which invites
Auseinandersetzung or a dialogue with the unconscious. Active imagi-
nation affords the unconscious its own freedom, its own integrity. It
seeks an expanded consciousness, which arises out of an encounter with
the intrapsychic Other.
Nancy is describing the encounter with the Other which arises out
of her capacity to relinquish ego control and to allow herself to be open
to the mystery. When the objects themselves begin to speak, when they
begin to unfold themselves, then we are in proper relationship to na-
ture, for we are respectfully allowing it its autonomy of being. Such an
attitude is essentially religious in character for it relocates the ego in
the presence of the transcendent Other. The experience of the mystery
of the Other is phenomenological, and our subsequent consciousness
of it is epiphenomenological; that is to say, primordial experience may
lead to the secondary and attendant experience of consciousness. Nancy
also writes that the "thing" excites libido and she is invited to a dynamic
dialogue with it: "Eventually a dialogue develops between me and the
image, which grows and changes in response to what's inside my head." 7
We see here that consciousness is not abandoned; it is enlarged and

still plays a role in the individuation process. Another way of saying
this is that fate, or the gods, determined that Nancy's work of individu-
ation would arise out of her dialogue with things and out of the
autonomy of images which derive from that dialogue. For other indi-
viduals the dialogue will arise from dream work, or the complexities
of relationship, or by following their daimon, wheresoever it wishes to
take them.
The quotidian questions we may have about Opening will not be
answered. What does it mean? Whose feet are those? Whose hands pull
back the fabric? Are the male hands allusions to specific figures or ani-
mus attitudes, in which case the painting is more allegorical than sym-
bolic? A l l we can safely say is that the painting calls our conventional
sense of reality into question. When this relocation of reality occurs,
we are in the presence of the visionary. Similarly, the holographic Blake
said one could see eternity in a grain of sand.
The viewer stands on the edge of the known world and stares off
into eternity. As we know, Archimedes once said that if he had a place
to stand he could move the world. For the last four centuries the com-
mon ground upon which the Western world once stood has been erod-
ing. Necessarily, the task of meaning ineluctably shifted from tribal
mythologies, institutional formulations, and conventional pieties to the
shoulders of the individual. As the mythic power of church and mon-
archy have waned, so the points of reference have disappeared. The
spiritual anarchy which follows is aided in part by the capacity of the
artist to nominate a point of reference, and from that point recreate
the world. While Opening suggests that the world is far more mysteri-
ous than we might have thought, it also presents us with a fascinating
aperture which takes us into a deeper plane. As we contemplate that
mystery, we sense that something may be contemplating us. As we
watch, perhaps we are being watched as well.
INSIDE: T H E O B J E C T I F I C A T I O N O F S U B J E C T I V I T Y
In the painting Inside we see Nancy at her work desk in apparent con-
templation and an image of a triangle within a circle. While the artist's
tools are present and the canvas waits, there is no mood for stroke or
figure yet. O n the left of the canvas we see a hanging lightbulb, some-
thing of a cultural convention for an illumination, but we surmise that
that bulb will end up much more integrated into the final painting,
which is yet to be done. A n d yet we are looking at the finished painting
already, are we not?
The triangular shapes, both on the canvas within the canvas and the
lighting above the painter, are themselves archetypal, three being the
number of creative power, of dynamism. But these triangles are also
contained by circles, mandalic rounds which imply closure and comple-
tion. One remembers the famous alchemical formula of Maria Proph-
etissa from the Middle Ages, namely: out of the one comes the two,
and out of the two comes the three, and out of the three comes the
four which shall become one. What the formulary suggests is that out
of the one of undifferentiated unconsciousness will come the two which
beget both consciousness and the splitting of neurosis. Out of that split
the reconciling third, which contains the opposites, will emerge and
dynamically spill over into the four, which is the tension of opposites
evolved to a higher level. Out of this more evolved tension of oppo-
sites, the possibility of the new One may emerge.
This portrait of a portrait, this painter painting herself, is itself a
part of the trompe I'oeil of reflectivity. We reflect upon ourselves re-
flecting upon ourselves. In this moment the subject seems transfixed
by a process. She appears captured by the power of the triangle, the
tetragram, the mandala, and something profound is moving in her. And
yet Nancy the painter has painted herself in this position, suggesting
not only the awareness of that moment of transfixion, but of having
also moved through it to something else. How many great poems came
from the Romantic poets, from "Kubla Khan" to "Ode on Dejection,"
in which the poet writes movingly about creative blockage, writes cre-
atively about the loss of creativity? Here the painter paints herself, not
painting, but being moved toward painting. Is it a painting almost about
painting, then, or is not every painting since the impressionists about
painting itself?
Moreover, we see that the boundary of the painting within the paint-
ing has been framed by the painter. The space in which her subject
contemplates is itself encapsulated as it exists in a realm unto itself,
which perhaps it does. What then constitutes the empty spaces to the
right and left of the capsule? Do they not exist to remind us of the ar-
Figure 2. I n s i d e . 1973. Oil on canvas with construction. 42" x 60"
bitrary point of view of this artist, that she has created her own place
of reference and that it lies not within the confines of the painting but
within the confines of her psyche, a reality which greatly transcends
the conscious frame of reference?
A n d lastly, the title of the painting, Inside—inside of what? Are we
inside the studio, inside the mind of the subject of the painter, inside
the mind of the painter herself? Are we inside always because, as Kant
insisted, the world itself is unknowable, and we can only provisionally
know what we have experienced inwardly? Kant demolished metaphys-
ics by removing the Archimedean point of the philosopher, thus mak-
ing psychology necessary. Psychology's most difficult task then becomes
to reflect upon itself, to not be the disease of what it is meant to cure,
as Wittgenstein once said of philosophy. Inside reminds us that we are
always inside, that such is our condition, although the world out there
beckons, visits, eludes, and confounds.
CAPRON: T H E P R E S E N C E O F T H O S E A B S E N T
At Nancy's mill, the room in which I stay has the painting entitled
Capron on the wall. At first glance I thought I saw Freud in the back-
ground. Upon close inspection I realized that it was a stranger. I learned
later that the image of the couple standing there is taken from a photo
of Nancy's paternal grandparents. The snapshot pinned to the easel is
a photo of her father, and the setting is the house in which they lived in
the village of Capron, Virginia. O f these figures, Nancy told me, "Both
men were Methodist preachers. Near the end of his life I went with my
Father to visit that area in Southeast Virginia and that house. While I
was making the painting I noticed that the fireplace was bricked up.
About that time I learned from an aunt that my Grandfather 'burned
out' long before retirement age. It seemed to me that my Father expe-
rienced something similar not long before his death. So it seemed i m -
portant that I note that the fire had shifted from some 'place' elsewhere." 8
In the picture the couple seem attired in clothing which vaguely

indicates a time and a class, and their attitude seemingly reflects a de-
gree of confidence or at the least nonchalant familiarity with who they
are, perhaps only because of a strong sense of role identity. In front is
a chalice, which reappears in several of Nancy's works. While the i m -
Figure3- C a p r o n . 1989. Oil on linen. 30" X36".
ages of the painting are heretofore both conventional and highly per-
sonal, we sense that the chalice has a significance which extends be-
yond the mere representation of a historical image. At this point, as in
the task of dream interpretation, we necessarily differentiate the role
of personal image, which may more properly be called sign, and that
of symbol. The depiction of the bricked-up fireplace, for example, is
an allegorical use of image in a one-to-one level of reference. "Blocked
fire," so to speak, equals "blocked 'fire.'"
Obviously, the implicit reference to blocked fire moves us toward
the allegorical and symbolic when we consider what blockage is and
what fire is. Even without Nancy's identification of the allegorical use
of the fireplace image, we might stumble toward a notion of why the
artist might have employed such an image. We might conclude that
the fires of certain energies are no longer regnant or available. How-
ever, with the image of the chalice we intuit that we are more properly
in that zone of ambiguity we call the symbolic. Generally speaking, the
chalice, whether it be the lost grail of medieval legend or the chalice
crushed beneath the bridegroom's heel, is a vessel which contains the
sacred. That this chalice holds a flickering flame suggests to us an hom-
age, or at least respect for, the continued power of the ancestral even as
we might find in a Japanese Shinto temple.
What Nancy Witt is attempting in Capron illustrates the veracity of
T. S. Eliot's observation about history, that it is not the pastness of the
past which is important, but the continuing presence of the past. As
therapists will testify, few powers are mightier than those which we call
the parental complexes, which operate more autonomously within us
because we are not conscious of them. They are present in our choices
and in our sense of self, and for good or ill they color our intimate re-
lationships. This insight, which is illustrated in genograms (used by
therapists to outline familial patterns of behavior) and case histories
and in the resonant reservoirs of dream imagery, is hardly new.
Greek mythology and tragedy sought to account for the replication
of familial patterns, for the power of invisible cause and effect, and for
the occasional madness which usurped reason and common sense. How
could Oedipus be the carrier of the sins of the House of Thebes, or
Electra and Orestes the unwitting bearers of generations of the House
I N C A R N A T T O N A L I M A G I N I N G S ( 73 )
of Atreus? They concluded that some historic offense to the gods had
occasioned a blood curse, which rippled through the generations until
suffering and penance produced sufficient consciousness to achieve
right relationship before the gods again. History is not only the story
of the individual writ large, as Emerson and Carlyle suggested, but the
exfoliation and extrapolation of those intrapsychic imagoes which Jung
called "complexes" and which are transmitted, not only through outer
example and admonition, but also invisibly through the unconscious.
Let me illustrate in a quite personal way. One summer I was invited
to speak in Stockholm and Solna, Sweden. While my ancestry was Swed-
ish (my long-deceased grandfather was named Gustav Lindgren, and
he had arrived in the New World in 1900), there was never any talk about
Sweden in our household. Even my mother had not spoken of her fa-
ther, whom she never really knew because he had died in a coal-mining
accident when she was quite young. O n my first night in Sweden, we
went to an outdoor restaurant for dinner. At dusk, the audience rose
and sang the national anthem as the flag was lowered. At that moment
a powerful voice echoed in my head, saying, "I have come back for you."
I was stunned by this voice and knew its meaning immediately,
namely, that I, the third generation, had returned home for those who
had been unable to and who had, like most Americans, never con-
sciously considered the idea. (While studying in Switzerland, I learned
that Europeans consider the influence of nation much more seriously
than we of the New World who not only melted into the national pot
but also believe that we have invented ourselves by overthrowing the
presumed tyranny of the past.) Moreover, while traveling through
southern Sweden, whence the Lindgrens would have come, I had nu-
merous experiences which could only be described as dejd vu. I was
further told by many Swedes that I looked, acted, and spoke like a Swede
though I spoke only in English. A l l this was and would remain puz-
zling and irrational to me were it not for one possibility, namely, the
transmission of the parental heritage through the unconscious.
The more we know about our biologies, the more we learn of our
genetic coding; the more we learn of depth psychology, the more we
discern the movement of the silent generations within us. In eliciting
the parent's parents, Nancy Witt is intuitively evoking the multiple
generations which are at work within her own contemporary psycho-
logical reality. Freud once observed that when a couple goes to bed, at
least four others are present, namely, the parents as complexes. We know
that at least the parents' parental complexes influenced our notions of
self, relationship, sexuality, and the like, so already there are at least
fourteen in bed, and all are active.
Jung took the power of such spectral presences very seriously. In an
essay written in 1919 and titled, "The Psychological Foundation for the
Belief in Spirits," he noted that we find in all traditions "a universal belief
in the existence of phantoms or ethereal beings who dwell in the
neighbourhood of men and who exercise an invisible yet powerful
influence upon them. These beings are generally supposed to be spir-
its or souls of the dead." Our predecessors knew what depth psychol-
9
ogy has had to rediscover for us: that we live simultaneously in two
worlds, the world of the senses and the invisible world which is haunted
by spectral presences which we call complexes, or projections. Jung re-
minds us of the power of these presences in his statement that "many
patients feel persecuted by their parents long after they are dead." The 10
word which Jung used to describe our experience of these phenomena

was Ergriffenheit, which one may translate as the ego's experience of
being seized or possessed by the power of an other.
Just as the ancients dramatized this possessive power in the tales of
wronged gods, hybristic patriarchs, and humbled grandchildren, so we
seek a different language for the same phenomena. Thus Jung writes,
"Spirits . . . viewed from the psychological angle, are unconscious au-
tonomous complexes which appear as projections because they have
no direct association with the ego."" When our ancestors experienced
such possession by spectral presences, they employed the metaphor of
the loss of soul. We use a more impoverished language and speak of
neurosis. Our ancestors recognized two forms of spiritual malady: the
loss of soul and possession by malignant spirits. We more vaguely talk
of not feeling ourselves, for some complex has robbed our energy, or
of being in the grip of a pervasive mood for unaccountable reasons.
Our presumed gain through such clinical imagery is at the expense of
the imaginal which moves the heart. A n affectively charged image, such
as spirit possession, will always touch us more deeply than an ener-
I N C A R N A T T O N A L I M A G I N I N G S (75)
vated, clinical language which pretends to accuracy but which dean-
imates nature and denudes the gods.
We have all experienced this form of possession, or this loss of soul.
It feels uncanny, frightening, alienating, humbling. Even nations can
collectively experience the loss of soul, as they are separated from their
psychic roots, or spirit possession, when consciousness is enervated and
they are at the mercy of fads, fashions, or malignant spirits. However,
the reintegration of such energies, whether through the traditional
powers of the shamans, tribal mythologies, the work of psychoanaly-
sis, or the inexplicable grace of consciousness, makes the split-off en-
ergies available to ego once more and one feels a sense of well-being.
What Nancy is doing in this painting is to consciously evoke the
parent's parents (for she senses they are present beyond the limits of
death, memory, and conscious influence) and to light a candle of con-
sciousness in the great darkness, which Jung has described as our fun-
damental task. We know that divorce does not end a marriage, nor death
end the influence of a parent, nor time erase the power of primal
epiphanies. Jung describes the mechanism by which this continuing
power occurs: "When a person dies, the feelings and emotions that
bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into
the unconscious, where they activate a collective content that has a
deleterious effect on consciousness." 12
Perhaps what the gods demand of us is not slavish worship, nor

infantilizing imitation, or apotropaic denial, but simply to be remem-
bered, to be respected as the truths which do not die as everything else
will. To hold a candle of consciousness in the darkness, to pay homage
to the power of the multigenerational influences which we carry into
daily life, means that our relationships with the past might prove less
troubled and our movement through the twin worlds which we inhabit
might be richer.
SUE'S FAN: T H E M E T O N Y M I E S O F M E M O R Y
After my maternal grandmother died, I wrote a poem of praise for her.

It is impossible of course to summon up the whole experience of a
person. So rich and variegated is our experience that we may render
only a small part of it conscious. O f the many images which flooded
Figure 4. Sue's Fan. 1988. Oil on linen. 48"X48".
me, one in particular took me back to the wonder of childhood. M y

grandmother worked a great deal in roses, and her wrists were often
scratched from this occupation. As a child, full of wonder and terror, I
observed much and pondered even more. These scratches both fright-
ened me and fascinated me, and bound me to her through her work
with flowers. The concluding lines of the poem, then, were redolent of
these images:
... roses and thorn-bitten wrists,
blood, and first blood,
in the first scratch of time.
The initial reference to blood is of the bloody scratches, and the sec-
ond refers to me, her first grandchild. But the scratch suggests that these
wounds are only the first of many to follow, not the least of which be-
ing mortality itself, not only for the deceased grandmother but also
for the child who will follow in her ash-bound steps. The focus on the
scratches is the metonymy of memory, a means by which that which is
associated may be utilized to summon up the whole. We can never
summon the whole, but if we are wise or lucky we will find the key
association which may evoke the power of the whole.
Anyone who works with dreams will testify to this common power
of the dream-maker to find such images which suggest, which intimate,
which conjure up the larger powers. Moreover, the blood scratch is it-
self symbolic of the mystery of incarnation, of the relationships of gen-
erations through the bloodline, and of the mortality which we carry in
our sanguinary sojourns.
In the painting Sue's Fan, Nancy has similarly focused on a memory
of her grandmother. The particular fan reminds us of the era before
air-conditioning, when every home and church and workplace had such
fans as necessary instruments of survival. We also observe a vessel of
some unguent for the skin, earrings, and a lamp which is no longer lit.
Each of these images is a thesaurus for the painter and tied to her spe-
cific experience, yet each has the power to summon us to memory and
to the power of metonymy.
O f the figures represented, Nancy wrote, "the figures in Sue's Fan
are both sets of grandparents—more different from each other than
you could imagine. I was named for both grandmothers—Nancy Sue.
Very Southern. Nancy taught me: 'When e'er a task awaits you, with
solemn judgment view it; don't sit and idly wish it done, begin at once
and do it.' [On the other hand] Sue: 'Whether a task be great or small,
do it well or not at all,' which somehow got translated into 'Don't
bother.'" 13
The way in which the portraits of the four grandparents are arranged
reminds one of a portion of a genogram. From such primal sources
come strong genes along with their moralizing rhymes and admoni-
tions. While Nancy the painter wryly suggests that no small part of her
life may have been lived in rebellion against those constricting expec-
tations, she acknowledges that she is of her grandmothers' blood in
more than her amalgamated name. Perhaps the woman who dares to
stand for forty and fifty hours a week before her canvas is doing ex-
actly what those maxims intended. "With solemn judgment view i t . . .
begin and do i t . . . task do well or not at all " How many of us have
spent our lives rebelling against admonitions and expectations and
running in the opposite direction only to find that we have fulfilled
the expectations in some cleverly disguised manner?
The children who spectrally sit in the window are Nancy and her
brother, the issue and descendants of these primal sources. We sense
that they surely were implicit in the beginnings, for we are all born
before we are born, in our parents' dreams and in their genetic coding.
We sense that they too are evanescent, as flimsy as that blowing cur-
tain. We sense in the lantern without light some missing insight, some
enlightening perspective. In the distance lies the happy isle, some valo-
rized Valhalla that one glimpses and never fully attains. It is always out
there, in sight, just now slipping over the horizon. Surely these images,
particular to a Virginia painter, are images which depict our condition
as well.
A n d of all the things upon which to focus, and to name the paint-
ing, why Sue's fan? Why not Nancy's earrings? Why not a curtain in
the wind? The particularity of the fan intrigues. As a specific artifact
of memory it is as tied to her ancestral source as my grandmother's
rose-bitten wrists. Yet such artifacts of memory stir the inexpressible
world of childhood with its plethora of affectively charged images. Rilke
wrote of his childhood, and out of the vast phantasmagoria of memory
he settled on the ball with which they played. He celebrated its luscious,
tactile curve, and yet, alas, how those mortal children stepped under
the falling ball. In one image—the ball—Rilke conjures both the inno-
cent game of childhood and the perilous perigee of their curving de-
scent toward death.
Sue's fan is shaped like a heart; it points away from the children, yet
its stem is bound to them, and it lies under a shroud unveiled for the
moment, in an instance as fleeting as the whip and flash of a gauzy
curtain in the wind. In such moments, flooded by the permutating
powers of the past, fleeting memory binds the far-flung islands of iden-
tity and knits psyche's cloth. Thus, for moments only, the curtains which
tumble are like ghosts which remind.
CHALICE: T H E G R E A T M O T H E R ' S C H I L D
Many of Nancy's paintings feature this same chalice, which is based on

a rather ordinary-looking metal cup in her cupboard. But that cup
becomes transformed in her paintings as we have seen, and in Chalice
it is central to her vision.
A n d what is the chalice which haunts and holds so many of our
projections? As we know, the grail imago has functioned within the
Christian tradition as the cup which held the wine become blood of
Christ which, though lost, still carries the projection of the search for
divinity. Another tradition has it that the chalice was fashioned from
an emerald dropped from Lucifer's forehead when he fell headlong into
the abyss. The archetypal imagination further employs the chalice as
the container, that which receives, holds, and perhaps alchemically
transforms. In this particular painting the chalice seems overflowing
with the effluvia of the great sea behind it, a primal symbol of the Magna
Mater, the nurturant matrix from which all things come. Sand, sea,
rocky shoal, and sky all meet here; the four-fold venues of the world
gather at the point of the sacred container. What does knit our lives,
our histories, our memories? What keeps constancy, if not the contain-
ing vessel which we call soul? The pre-Socratic Heraclitus averred that
the human soul was a distant land whose boundaries could never be
found. Only through such images as the chalice can we have a bridge
to the invisible world, without which we live in emptiness.
WINDOWS: T H R O U G H A G L A S S D A R K L Y
Our lives are suffused with stimuli of unimaginable proportion and

unassimilable magnitude. One of the several functions of dreams seems
to be to process the dross and detritus of daily life, to help us clear a
space for the coming day. Inevitably, the influx of stimuli is dissociated
Figure 5. Chalice. 1988. Oil on linen. 40" X52".
Figure 6. W i n d o w s . 1990. Oil on linen. 34" x 44".
and rendered banal if observed at all. One of the gifts of the artist is to
call attention to, to bring into focus, to lift the extraordinary out of the
everyday. I have the privilege of living with an artist, and her way of
seeing, her sensitivity to nuance of shade, texture, and form has obli-
gated the expansion of my visual world. If Wordsworth could see in a
moment's epiphany that the violet by the mossy stone was the work of
eternity, then the gift of the artist is to make us mindful of those depths
which course beneath all surfaces. As Eluard reminds, "There is another
world, and it is this one."
In Windows we find an apparently banal scene, a basement, a work-
place, a window which leads nowhere. But there is that lightbulb there
again, as central as the light in Guernica. Yet it, too, has its shadow on
the wall and reality is doubled. We have a mirror to the outside which
does not reveal very much, and we have a glass frame against the wall,
leading nowhere, which shows us the painter herself. Through the glass
darkly (which, in the King James version of I Corinthians 13, meant to
see oneself dimly in the mirror), one finds oneself now in a vertigi-
nous world of planes and altered states. If that is the painter in the
framed glass, then who is painting the painter, or from what perspec-
tive then are we seeing, or being seen? A n d what kind of window might
it be which casts such rectangular light across the wall at such an angle
unless the window itself is the begetter of our illumination, so that
planes of reality cut across each other all the time? So we have glass
through which we see, and glass in which we see ourselves; we have
windows upon the banal and windows upon eternity; we have the
painter painting a painting about a painter painting a painting, which
is really about another subject, which is not clear, unless that which we
thought clear and is not, is in fact the subject, and that these planes of
reality intersect in our lives all the time, and that is the plain plane truth.
At the bottom in the center stands the homely can with the tools of
the trade, and the brushes point in all the directions of the painting,
even as the hands in Guernica reach for the light. A n d that light on the
right is balanced by the obscure white circle of tape on the left. Is it a
mandalic image, a casual object, or the empty eye of eternity?
SECOND OPENING: R E N D I N G T H E C U R T A I N O F E T E R N I T Y
This painting illustrates Jung's previously cited remarks about how

primordial experience allows a glimpse into the abyss. We who seek
may also be sought. It is well known that the inscription over the en-
trance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi offered the very sage advice,
"Know Thyself." But it has been reported that over the entrance to the
inner temple, which could be obtained only after a rigorous spiritual
apprenticeship, there was inscribed, " T h o u Art." We recall that nu-
minous comes from a word meaning "to nod," and we need to remem-
ber that soul is found in all the world and autonomously seeks us as
well. It nods at us as it solicits connection. This painting is the obverse
of Opening, which typifies our search for the divine and suggests that
the divine may well be searching for us.
Just as we frequently find strangers in our dreams who seem to know
us, so there is something which is familiar in all of us, for we are of this
contiguous cosmos—plant, animal, and soul, and only ego splits us off.
We recall Holderlin in "Patmos": "That which thou seekest is near, and
/ already coming to meet thee." Or Pascal's pensee, "Console thyself, thou
woulds't not be seeking me hadst thou not already found me." O r Plato
in the Meno that all knowledge is re-cognition of that which is primor-
dially known.
What stands on the other side of that curtain, the limit of conscious-
ness, the veil of mortality, the poverty of imagination? What reaches
through toward us? What rends the quotidian plane of sea and surf
and sky? A n d what do we see when we see through the glass darkly, or
glimpse the other side for a moment? We see here, at least, a blank screen
on which eternity, or the mind's eye, or our projections find their ex-
pression. What can we know of that other side? We can only be capable
of that which we may know in this limited state, but there, beyond time
and number, and space and limit, is our home, and we carry that same
home within each of us. We resonate to such images because they are
the carriers of such energy as courses through us even as it animates
the cosmos. We are moved only by like to like. What beckons from the
other side, and to whose mythic motions all of us move, is, in ways we
could never comprehend, like us, of us, about us. Such an image as the
Figure7. S e c o n d O p e n i n g . 1989. Oil on linen. 24"X30".
Second Opening is a window not only on eternity but on the infinite
reaches of the human psyche as well.
RHYTON: H E R E IS M Y B L O O D , D R I N K
O f Rhyton Nancy Witt said, "Rhyton is a Greek drinking cup I hap-

pen to own the one in the painting of that name—has to do with
Bacchus in my mind, hence passion, fire, and all that good stuff." In 14
the effort to "image up," which is the contribution the archetypal imagi-
nation makes in our effort to approach the ineffable, we are present to
something heating up. O f the twenty volumes of the Collected Works,
Jung devoted three of them to alchemy. His interest i n alchemy is
enough to mark him suspect in most psychological circles, but he rec-
ognized that the alchemists were the last in the Western tradition to
seek to hold spirit and matter together before their fatal fracturing into
physics, chemistry, psychology, philosophy, medicine, and theology.
Moreover, Jung recognized that there is no artifact of human culture
which does not carry the imprint of the human psyche. Every psychol-
ogy, he said, is a subjective confession, telling us more of the author
than of the psyche. So, too, is every theology, for the mystery remains
mysterious and ineffable.
Tracking the way in which the psyche structures this invisible world,
as it does in our dreams each night or in our tribal mythologies, is a
work requiring great patience but offering great reward. In Rhyton, the
flammable materials of the psyche are stirring in the drinking cup. In
that cup is the fruit of the vine, sacred to the dying god Dionysus-
Bacchus, or later the blood of Christ. The transubstantiation of matter
is the life-long goal of many religions, the transmutation of dross ma-
terial into pure spirit. What breaks forth from this wine is the triple
taurean imago of the bull, which is also associated with the Magna
Mater. The sacrifice of the child to the Great Mother survives in the
ritualized slaying of the bull in Spanish culture. The mythology of the
dying-reborn god is central to the religions of the Near East, the stories
of Adonis, Tammuz, Dionysus, Jesus Christ, and others, and partakes
of that mythological movement we may call "the cycle of sacrifice." Two
great mythic paradigms move the world: the linear, solar hero quest
Figure 8. Rhyton. 1986. Oil on linen. 46" x 46".
which is developmental, and the lunar, cyclic birth-rebirth which dra-

matizes how life renews itself.
Both of these mythic paradigms may be found in some fashion in
all cultures, for both are required to answer our questions as to how
life moves forward and how life dies and is reborn. These patterns an-
tedate Christianity by millennia, but, because they are archetypal, they
illustrate how these primordial images are necessary to animate, to " i m -
age forth" later primordial experiences. Nancy may or may not con-
sciously be drawing on these traditions, but that matters little, for these
images have a life of their own. As Jung said, the archetypal images are
formative patterns, which attract such materials as are useful for their
representation or incarnation. From such heating up, the psyche fash-
ions forth the transformation of wine into spirit and of those who drink
into divinity.
GLASS DARKLY: F O R N O W W E S E E C L E A R L Y
What, we may ask, is the subject of this painting, Glass Darkly? Is it the
objects on the canvas? Is it the painter herself? Is it the painter paint-
ing? Is it meant to induce questioning about the separate but intersect-
ing planes of reality? Since the invention of the daguerreotype in the
1830s, painting has been released from any obligation to reproduce a
photographic version of reality. Perhaps the best contribution of any
art is to provide an angle of vision, as long as we recall that the painting
is to oblige our questioning of the variegated versions of ontic reality.
In establishing the wine bottle and fruit, the painter invokes the
painterly interest in surfaces and planes, vertical, angular, and spher-
oid. In showing herself painting these objects she suggests her lineage
from at least Cezanne to the present. In positioning the worker's glove
and a used tube of acrylic she reminds us that what she does is her work,
a labor from nine to five, six days a week. A n d yet by tearing the hori-
zontal strip across the canvas, a trompe I'oeil, which is not a tear at all,
she reminds us of the planes within planes which exist simultaneously.
Only consciousness intersects these planes.
In a poem titled "A High-toned O l d Christian Woman," Wallace
Stevens asserts that he, the poet, and she, the theologue, are about the
same process, the making of fictions. But the poet remains metaphysi-
cally and psychologically free in his awareness of the fictive nature of
all knowledge and the provisionality of all perspectives, while she re-
mains trapped in her idolatrous literalism. Such fictions are necessary,
coming from facere in Latin, meaning "to make," for all constructs are
things made. To fall in love with our own constructs and believe that
they contain the mystery is blasphemous, for such reification seeks to
colonize the mystery on behalf of ego's dominion. This modern sensi-
bility is required since depth psychology has taught us that each state-
Figure9. Glass Darkly. 1982. Oil on linen, 36"X42".
ment about reality is an implicit Rorschach of our own mind. What

Blake called "reorganized innocence" is necessary to spare us from the
sin of literalism, which is an unintended insult to the autonomy and
complexity of mystery. As Stevens concludes his poem, "This will make
widows wince. But Active things / Wink as they will. Wink most when
widows wince." The wink is not only the numinous winking at us,
15
but we need to wink back to be conscious of the game of fictions which

we employ to approach the holy. Nancy Witt's planes upon planes,
painted by the painter painting herself, is a supreme act of conscious-
ness of the ineffable, of the wonderful tool that art may be for us when
we approach the numinous, and of the need to wink as a measure of
respect for the mystery.
PAINTING: A S E A T AT T H E E D G E O F T H E R E A L
In Painting Nancy tells us what we are observing: a painting, with the

now familiar elements of surf, sea, and sky, stretching out to the hori-
zon of the imaginal. Having lived only a mile from the Atlantic Ocean
for nearly twenty years, I know how cliched the portraits of the sea are—
depictions of romantically tossed surf, nostalgic blankets and umbrel-
las for tourists to take back to the heartland. But that is not what we
encounter in Painting. As before, Painting is about a painting which is
about painting. A n d what is the act of painting about? Is it a recollec-
tion of the eye and memory? A photograph captures that moment, but
a moment is evanescence itself, and so the painting seeks to capture an
essence which extends beyond the transient to the essential.
Ostensibly this painting is of a seascape in which the demarcation
between object and replication disappears as the margin of the canvas
within the canvas merges with the background of the painting and
becomes one. Yet the painting at the center of Painting depicts the tri-
angular opening in the clouds even as the wave lines coincide exactly,
suggesting again the mixing of planes of reality. In addition, we ask
where the painter is, the painter who sat in that barber's seat. Why there
she is, silhouetted on the sand before her easel, but it cannot be this
easel, so that shadowy figure must be painting a painting other than
this one. A n d who, we ask, is painting a painting titled Painting'm which
there is a painting alongside of which is a silhouette of a painter paint-
ing another painting while all of this has presumably been painted by
still another painter? Who is the painter of these painters, then? We
may answer that question only by knowing what we mean by God, who
watches the universe, or the archetypal imagination which exists at
multiple levels simultaneously. The only way in which we might be able
to conjure with these multilayered intimations of reality is to accept
the fictive character of what we hastily name reality and to realize that
it is through the conscious use of the fictive (facere, "to make") that we
become what Hermann Hesse called the Magister Ludi der Glasperlin,
the masters of the glass bead game of the world. Only those who play
the reality game consciously, that is, with the conscious use of image,
metaphor, and symbol, are spared the self-deception of literalism.
Figure w. Painting (V). 1984. Oil on linen. 38" diameter.
BAILEY WON: R E F R A C T I O N S O F T I M E , P L A C E , A N D P E R S O N
Bailey Island, off the coast of Maine, is a place where Nancy often vaca-
tions in the summer, a place Jung himself visited, as did many of the
first generation of analysts who studied under him. In the published
collection of her paintings, Nancy writes, "In the summer of 19841 spent
several weeks on an island in Maine. I lived in a little red house perched
on rocks with the wild Atlantic for my front yard. I had never lived alone
before and experienced both freedom and hitherto unknown fears
There is a poem by Emily Dickinson in which she speaks of dwelling in
possibility. M y red house has come to be just such a dwelling for me." 16
In the silhouette of the painter one senses the aloneness, the con-
templative character of the moment and the work of the canvas within
the canvas yet to be completed. As there is a canvas to fill, so there is a
life to continue, to fill in new areas. In the homey V-8 can at the right
we find the tools, the brushes, and the oils, and from the shadowed
recesses of the artist we know the images will arise to reflect not only
the wild Atlantic but the imaginative sensibility which brings order and
meaning and, as Rilke noted in the Duino Elegies, which summons up
being itself through the evocations of consciousness. In this painting
we not only see again the multiple levels of reality, with even an await-
ing easel in the Atlantic itself, but the true subject—found in the act of
consciousness which makes meaning possible.
In the center is a bowl of water which intimates that smaller source
we carry within us, the personal unconscious, which is itself a portion
of the oceanic background of the collective unconscious. Through these
two alembics, bowl and sea, personal and collective unconscious, the
same energy flows. Things above are copies of things below; the hu-
man psyche is the receptacle of the oceanic energies and, in turn, brings
the incarnational power of the particular. Without the cosmic ener-
gies, the individual would not live; without the individual, the cosmos
would never be incarnated. It is only the limits of our ego-conscious-
ness which object to the flowing of one reality, one canvas over into
another, when in the imaginal world all is one. The archetypal Fall from
undifferentiated bliss into consciousness created number, twoness, and
only the archetypal imagination has the power to recover the unity
which courses through this universe of "the ten thousand things."
From this title, Bailey Won, we sense that not only has the painter
had to wrest from loneliness and disorientation a new sense of iden-
tity but a mythological grounding as well. The woman who can go
through this time of loss of others, and points of reference, is obliged
to discover that the longitudes and latitudes of the soul are within. She
has learned that the silence is not silent, and that the dark is luminous.
She has, in her loneliness, achieved solitude. When one is not alone
when one is alone, when one is aware of a goodly presence within one-
Figure u. B a i l e y W o n . 1985. Oil on linen. 30" X36".
self, then one has achieved solitude. Our popular culture is a tacit agree-
ment to flee the terror of loneliness, and it therefore circumvents the
possibility of solitude. The avoidance of solitude is the flight, ultimately,
from oneself. Paradoxically, it is only in solitude that our creativity and
our gift to others will be found. As Jung has written so provocatively,
"Individuation cuts one off from personal conformity and hence from
collectivity. That is the guilt which the individual leaves b e h i n d . . . for
the world, that is the guilt he must endeavor to redeem. He must offer
a ransom in place of himself, that is, he must bring forth values which
are an equivalent substitute for his absence in the collective personal
sphere." 17
The suffering of loneliness brings the encounter with the Self, which
is found in the attainment of solitude, which becomes the source from
which the new, the unique images of the individual arise to enhance,
differentiate, and expand the collective sphere. The meaning of suffer-
ing is to find what that suffering may mean, and out of this discovery
the person grows, contributes new values to the collective, and thereby
wins the battle of Bailey Island.
CICATRICE: H E A L I N G T H E W O R L D 3 S W O U N D
In Cicatrice, an archaic word meaning scar, we recall the earlier images

of Opening and Second Opening. The former summoned us to look
below the visible world and see the vertiginous depths, and the latter
alerted us to the autonomy of the numinous which winks, intimates,
and invites rapprochement. Here we see no painter's silhouette, no
canvas upon canvas, but the familiar elements of surf, sea, and sky are
again transmogrified. The rent fabric is knit together, somewhat hu-
morously by the incongruity of adhesive bandages, as if to make it
impossible for us not to remember we are seeing a painting, but that
the painting is as valuable a point of entry into the mystery of ordi-
nary life as any metaphysics, any science, any theology.
It is precisely at the point of the split where the numinous and the
opening of consciousness to depth touch. Such a contact, and such an
Auseinandersetzung, to use one of Jung's favorite words, constitutes the
activity of what he called the transcendent function. While we cannot
know that other world, be it the cosmos without or the cosmos within,
Figure 12. C i c a t r i c e . 1994. Oil on linen. 23" x 32 ".
we may receive intimations from attendance upon their meeting point
in vestigial images. We do not know, for example, the unconscious, but
we have a dream image which presents itself to waking consciousness.
Such an image bridges two worlds and partakes of both. The assimila-
tion of such images into consciousness enlarges and nourishes con-
scious life. Without such access to depth we remain superficial and
without vitality.
Yet the paradox of consciousness, for all its gifts, is found in the
splitting upon which it is based. Without the splitting of the primal
unity, consciousness cannot be birthed, but such splitting splinters and
separates. Our ancestors dramatized this sundering separation as the
Fall. The bandages remind us that such wounds are never wholly healed.
They constitute the condition of mortal beings who have visions of
divinity, who, though mortal, write immortal symphonies and poems,
and paint openings to eternity. Cicatrice is the world's wound, never
wholly healed, taped together, and yet the meeting point from which
consciousness and creativity are found. As Odysseus was recognized
by the faithful servant Euraclea by his wound, as Shakespeare's Corio-
lanus displayed his wounds as signature of his service to Rome, as Jesus
was recognized by his astonished disciples on the road to Emmaus, so
we are the carriers of the cicatrice which is our condition, our wound,
and our unfolding splendor.
RING OF FIRE: C R E A T I V E C O N F L A G R A T I O N
As a last sample of the personal and archetypal imagination at work, we

see Ring of Fire. At the center is the same rent between this world and
the other, between the Sehnsucht fur Ewigekeit and the summons of the
nodding numinous, between the world's wound and the transcendent
function's linkage. This time a flower breaks forth. From our deepest
wound incredible beauty may be born. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins speaks of the transformative mystery, of how humans are born
of the sod, of how from matter springs the mystery of soul, of how from
the crimson defeat on the cross springs the alchemical gold: "blue-bleak
embers... fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion." The famil- 18
iar sand, surf, and sky are now muted yet transfigured by the same i m -
age Dante used to represent the beatific vision—the multifoliate rose.
Figure 13. Ring of Fire. 2992. Oil on linen. 52" X52".
O f this painting Nancy wrote, "In meditation this morning I heard

'Be still my soul' and for the first time wondered why on Earth anyone
would want to still the soul. I think I have always wished for fire from
mine." We recall the flammable spirit of Rhyton. We recall that fire
19
has so often been a symbol of spirit, as in the flaming tongues of the

Holy Spirit. We recall the bricked-up fire of the family. And we recall
that the circle or mandala has so often appeared in world cultures as
an image of wholeness, of the balance of opposites, and of how things
begin and end in a common point. So in this brief exploration of the
vision of a single person, Nancy Witt of Virginia, we observe the emer-
gence of archetypal images to incarnate the invisible powers of both
personal and archetypal process. As Shakespeare suggested of imagi-
nation, this is the power "to lend to airy nothing a local habitation and
a name."
Individuating persons contribute their gifts to the collective, and in
their private visions, publicly shared, profoundly recharge the most
ancient of images. They are all present: earth, air, fire, and water, the
four elements of Democritus, the multifoliate rose of Dante, the world's
wound healed by beauty which bursts and bestows. A n d through this
vision of a single pair of eyes we are spared Blake's "single vision and
Newton's sleep" and are present to the eternal which moves each mo-
ment. Such is the gift to us from the artist, the remembrance that, in
the words of poet Stephen Dunn, "everything he does takes root, hums
/ beneath the surfaces of the world." 20
CHAPTER 4
therapeutic Q^ma^ininqs
Psychopathology and Soul
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

These are the tears of things, and the stuff
of our mortality cuts us to the heart.
—Virgil
beyond our grasp. In a poem titled "Introduction to the 20th Century,"
Stephen Dunn writes,
For every
lame god a rhythm and a hunch, something local
we could trust. We learned to put
history books down gently on the table,
conscious of the Hitlers in them, the Stalins,
monsters that were ours and no one else's.
In difficult times, we came to understand,
it's the personal and only the personal that matters. 1
I do not know i f the poet ever knew that Jung called neurosis a
"wounded god," a telling, hermeneutical metaphor for the depth dy-
namics of the soul which is repressed, split off, projected. But we all
know the truth of this metaphor, this lame god Dunn evokes in a mis-
shapen century, and in the sundry pathologies of our misshapen lives.
To counter this deep dis-ease, this existential certainty that nothing is
any longer certain, we seek our private rhythms, trust the velleities of
our intuitions, and rely on the apparently known from which to chart
our cautious courses. We know we have bred monsters, and not just in
sleep, but in the pasty-faced man with a mustache who gave nightmares
to the world, and against which we have to measure all Victorian fan-
tasies of meliorism, progress, and perfectibility. A n d we know, if we
are honest and have ventured out from the quiet porches of our sleep-
ing ancestors, that we carry such monsters within ourselves, that we
can no longer point over the distant horizon to dissociate from this
hurt, horrible slayer of sleep, reason's renegade, or from the maligni-
ties of mind. Dunn, like most modern and postmodern artists, pros-
pects the personal, tracks the truths with small t, and seeks solipsistic
solace. With the common ground gone, the metaphysical consensus
betrayed, he has little choice. A n d we have little choice but to continue
to link the merely personal with the archetypal, to find what ancient
rhythms course within us, even when it is our pathologies which may
at last lead us home.
When we recall that the foundation metaphors, or archetypes, rep-
resent radical openings to mystery, then we recover the possibility of
depth which is missing in modern psychology and psychotherapy. To
consciously evoke soul when we practice psychology (the expression
of soul) or psychotherapy (the attendance upon soul) or address psy-
chopathology (the suffering of soul) is to recover something original,
profound, and generally lost to modern practice. O f course we do not
know what soul itself means, but this not knowing is proper to sustain
the soul's purchase on mystery. In the etymological metaphors of soul
we find both the transmogrifying butterfly and the verb "to breathe,"
the invisible inspiriting, animating energy which enters the husk of life
at birth, undergoes its autonomous permutations, and departs at death.
Tracking this deep, divine breath was historically the task of my-
thologies, then theologies, and now, when the gods have withdrawn
and gone inward as Jung suggests, the task of depth psychology. The
lame gods are now psychopathologies and find their incarnation as
somatic illness, addictions, sociopathies, neuroses, and personality dis-
orders. Only when we discern the divine dramatic in these patterns will
we have any respect for the fact that they are indeed psychodynamic,
the dynamics of the soul. Only then can we recall what Jung and
Hillman have been saying, only to be more and more ignored, over the
course of the twentieth century. Only then can psychopathology be seen
not only as the sufferings of the soul but the embodied religious crisis
of the modern as well.
I have the greatest of respect for the work of behavioral modifica-
tion, cognitive therapy, and psychopharmacology, for surely we are
repetitive, self-defeating behaviors, the carriers of acquired and unpro-
ductive thoughts, and reenactors of our biological lineage. Yet to focus
on any of those approaches, at the exclusion of the others, is to fail to
engage the whole person. What is needed even more today is a psycho-
therapy that addresses the wounding to the soul, the healing intentions
of the soul, and the developmental motives which emanate from the
soul. This psychological attitude restores dignity and depth to our
suffering, and to the sacred trust which therapy demands.
Those who work as therapists are frequently obliged to use the ubiq-
uitous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (commonly called the DSM).
While the purpose of the manual is to facilitate diagnosis, which then
presumably assists in the formation of treatment plans, in practice the
DSM only helps statisticians and insurance companies manage patient
care by containing costs. A physician friend of mine recently attended
a class given at a prestigious teaching hospital in which he and his col-
leagues were taught how to identify and treat depression and still have
the patient out of the office within ten minutes. One simply asks cer-
tain limited questions, inquiring as to sleeping patterns, the presence
of irritability, and so on. Then a prescription is written. For the sec-
ond, and presumably final visit, these same questions are asked. Above
all, the teaching physician said to the class, "do not ask any personal
questions. Do not ask how their life is going or they will stay beyond
ten minutes." I have not made this up. It is the tenor of the times. In-
deed, similar anecdotes will be found in the repertoire of anyone prac-
ticing therapy today. They represent the reduction of the whole person
to a soul-less, fractionated machine. No wonder people distrust the
healers nearly as much as the insurance companies.
In the DSM, the bible of modern diagnosis for which schools offer
T H E R A P E U T I C I M A G I N I N G S ( 101 )
full-semester classes on its use, and in modern practice, where those in
agencies or those seeking third-party payment are required to employ
a diagnostic category, there is no speculation on etiology (which god
has been offended), the meaning of this soul's suffering, or the ideo-
logical therapeutic which must transpire for healing. Defenders will say
that the DSM only does what is asked to do, and they are right, but it is
itself illustrative of a moral bankruptcy, a failure of nerve before the
really important questions. Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed that
philosophy is the disease for which it is supposed to be the cure. The
DSM is a symptom of the bankruptcy of the modern therapeutic imagi-
nation and an impediment for which the profession is to blame, the
ignorance of which actually adds to the suffering of the individual. I
recall one behavioral psychologist who entered analysis with me in New
Jersey and who smirked at our first meeting, saying, "Everyone knows
when we do our own therapy, we come to a psychodynamic person."
That he knew this for himself, and practiced otherwise, is as uncon-
scionable as it is common.
We do not know what the psyche is, this noun taken from a verb
psychein, "to breathe." But therein lies the clue that the psyche is a verb
and not a noun, a process and not an entity. To think of the psyche,
even the unconscious, as an entity leads to the fallacy of literalism
wherein one is more easily seduced by the fantasy of measurement or
manipulation, rather than the more respectful effort to track those
energies as intentions and to possibly align oneself with them. Jung has
noted this difficulty:
[Our] premises are always far too simple. The psyche is the start-
ing point of all human experience, and all the knowledge we have
gained eventually leads back to it. The psyche is the beginning and
end of all cognition. It is not only the object of its science, but the
subject also. This gives psychology a unique place among all the
other sciences: on the one hand there is a constant doubt as to the
possibility of its being a science at all, while on the other hand
psychology acquires the right to state a theoretical problem the
solution of which will be one of the most difficult tasks for a future
philosophy. 2
(l02) A R C H E T Y P A L I M A G I N A T I O N
For psychology to have depth, or even consciousness, it must continue
to reflect upon itself, its premises, its assumptions, its self-delusion. We
know next to nothing about psyche and even less about the person who
comes before us in therapy. How could we know the right course for
that person? Perhaps their fate, and their individuation, is a path of
suffering, exile, or alienation rather than some state with the smarmy
descriptor "well adjusted." As T. S. Eliot once observed, in a world of
fugitives, the person going the right direction will appear to be running
away. A n d whatever provisional purchase on reality we attain today will
be obviated by psyche's flow tomorrow. Again, the most eloquent voice
is that of Jung: "There is a widespread prejudice that analysis is some-
thing like a 'cure,' to which one submits for a time and then is discharged
healed. That is an . . . error left over from the early days. Analytic treat-
ment could be described as a readjustment of psychological attitude
. . . but there is no change which is unconditionally valid over a long
period of time." 3
Jung's emphasis implies not only that there is no fixed view of what
is right, and permanent, for a person, but that the psyche's permuta-
tions tomorrow will throw today's understanding aside. Moreover, Jung
repeatedly emphasized that the therapist has no special knowledge
superior to that which the analysand already carries within. The final
authority is not, to use a repulsive word, the "shrink," but the emer-
gent testimony of the living psyche. Once again, Jung: "Analysis is not
a method . . . of putting things into the patient that were not there be-
fore. It is better to renounce any attempt to give direction, and simply
to throw into relief everything that the analysis brings to light, so that
the patient can see it clearly.... Anything he has not acquired himself
he will not believe in the long run, and what he takes over from au-
thority merely keeps him infantile. He should rather be put in a posi-
tion to take his own life in hand." 4
Surely this respect for the truth which lies within the individual soul,
and whose intention is incarnation in the world, has a respectful, even
religious character to it. How different such an attitude of participa-
tion in the great mystery is from the DSMs, from the training of mod-
ern psychologists, and from that oxymoronic obscenity, "managed care."
The ultimate end of depth psychology is to stand respectfully before
inner truth and dare to live it in the world. What blocks each of us is
fear—fear of loneliness, fear of rejection, and most of all, fear of large-
ness. We are all afraid to move from the confining powers of fate into
the invitations of our destiny, afraid to step into the largeness of our
calling to be who we were meant to be.
Another consideration requires attention here. When Jung says, "a
feeling is as indisputable a reality as the existence of an idea," feeling
5
types will say "of course" and thinking types will learn this truth at their
begrudging expense. Jung considered feeling, along with thinking, one
of the two rational functions. Sensation and intuition are experiential.
But both feeling and thinking weigh, measure, ratio, evaluate. So surely,
to invoke the popular cliche, to be out of touch with one's feelings is to
be separated from a powerful internal guidance mechanism which offers
a continuous commentary on the course of our lives and invites be-
haviors appropriate to those evaluations. But too often we continue to
confuse feeling with emotion. Emotion is the raw, neurological dis-
charge of energy when a stimulus occurs. That energy is immediately
processed through the screen of the particular person's sensibility, that
is, the complexes, culture, and extent of consciousness. What transpires
after this screening is feeling, which is fraught not only with judgment
but with a content as well. The content of a feeling is not only energy,
that is, emotion, but thought as well. That thought may be based on a
false premise, a misreading of external reality, but it has its own self-
referential character.
Often these thoughts are primitive in character, when they can be
rendered conscious. They say something like, "I am afraid of loss," or
"I desire safety," or "I wish to hide from this experience," and so on.
The more the experience activates the primordial history we all carry,
the more primitive, that is, the more unconscious and undifferenti-
ated the thought which is embodied. Thus, even painful feelings are
not themselves the pain, but rather embody painful thought and acti-
vate the a priori belief system which concludes that one is in pain. This
is like the man who goes to the physician and says to him, "Doctor, when
I touch my head it hurts. When I touch my chest it hurts. When I touch
my abdomen it hurts." The doctor gives him a complete examination
and says, "I know what your problem is. You have a broken finger."
Confusing emotion with thought and calling it feeling is to be
trapped in an unwitting literalism once again. The key to healing lies
not only in discernment of thought, with its appropriateness or lack
thereof, but also the subjective character of the screen through which
the emotional charge has been processed. It is at this point that we come
back to the main thread of these discussions, the power of the image
to carry energy, value, and even, as a de facto mythology, to dictate
behaviors.
As an exemplification of the power of such intrapsychic imagoes,
we may examine the way in which they appear in that range of mental
and behavioral function which is called the personality disorder. As we
know, impaired or distorted mental functioning is generally catego-
rized as psychosis, organic brain syndrome, neurosis, or personality
disorder. In the nineteenth century this last category bore a heavy moral
freight and included such terms as "moral imbecility" (which had noth-
ing to do with intelligence but was instead concerned with social con-
formity) or sometimes even "moral insanity." In the twentieth century
such individuals were then classified as having "character disorders,"
still implying some flaw of character, as if a healthy person would au-
tomatically and consistently act virtuously. Today, such assumptions
appear naive, idiosyncratic, and ethnocentric. (As I was told more than
once in Switzerland, a Bavarian, acting like a Bavarian, would in Swit-
zerland be classified as mentally deranged). Personality disorders still
create some metaphoric dissonance, and Jungian therapists often re-
fer to "disorders of the Self" instead. This last metaphor, while shun-
ning moralism, comes closer to the truth. While we do not know the
Self, that mysterious and dynamic purposefulness in each of us, each
of us does have "a sense of Self."
The sense of Self is carried in a congeries of intrapsychic imagoes.
Life is inherently traumatic. At birth we are ripped from primordial
connection, beneficent belonging, are flung into an uncertain world,
and end in annihilation. The magnitude and qualitative character of
the inevitable wounding shapes the sensibility of the person, that is,
programs the intrapsychic imago in profound and reflexive ways, the
imago through which we interpret the spectrum of experiences which
come to us. From the child's phenomenological reading of the envi-
ronment and experiences, a sense of Self, a sense of Other, and acquired
strategies of transactions between them are assembled. This assemblage
constitutes the inevitable false self or provisional personality with which
we enter the world. Invariably it is a misreading, for it lacks alternative
experiences, lacks conscious reflectivity, and remains trapped in the
fallacy of overgeneralization.
For the child who experiences the world as essentially overwhelm-
ing—the abusive father, the needy mother, the grim world of poverty—
a profound sense of powerlessness provides the core datum from which
a coping strategy must emerge. That person will learn, quite logically
in the face of the powerful Other out there, patterns of avoidance, ag-
gression, or most likely, compliance with the demands of the environ-
ment. The more adaptation which is necessitated by environmental
demands, the greater the degree of self-alienation. From such an i n -
trapsychic imago comes, for example, codependence, which always
repeats the matrix of the power of the other, to whom one must adapt
one's own reality in search of approval of that other.
The child who experiences the world as essentially insufficient, with
his or her core needs for nourishment and affirmation unmet, will tend
to internalize a sense of self similarly based on absence, will collude
with his or her own devaluation, and will enter the world not only with
diminished expectations but with self-defeating, confirmative behav-
iors as well. Or, just as logically, he or she will spend a lifetime solicit-
ing the affirmations of the other. While often choosing persons who
are affectively impaired themselves, he or she continues to implore the
other for solace, yet expects and usually receives disappointment. From
such intrapsychic imagoes, addictive behaviors and replicative relation-
ships transpire.
In that sector of humanity called personality disorders, or disorders
of self, we see that the central phenomenon is the power of the intra-
psychic imago to overrule the dictates of reason, experience, and the
counsel of others. From the outset of modern psychology, therapists
recognized a category of patients who could consciously experience
their lives but lacked the capacity to reflect, to internalize, gain insight,
and to work through toward alternatives. While this dilemma is often
found in a wide range of personality disorders, we may here reflect on
what has since come to be called the borderline personality disorder.
While literature on the phenomenon goes back to the 1890s, the term
borderline was first used in the 1930s for a group of persons who were
not psychotic yet whose conditions did not resemble garden-variety
neuroses either.
What is common to all personality disorders, or disorders of self, is
that the primordial experiences tend to obliterate the nascent self, which
then impairs the developmental capacity of ego to discern conscious
alternatives. Most often these primordial experiences are of physical
or emotional abuse, sometimes of profound neglect, sometimes from
cultural cataclysms but most often from within the family of origin.
These primordial experiences fracture the emergent ego and diffuse its
core, a process that one may describe as an identity diffusion. Thus,
one lacks an integrated sense of self and/or an integrated sense of the
other. From this diffuse sense of self one often suffers from feelings of
chronic emptiness that are manifest in impoverished relationships with
others.
Additionally, the defenses which this person acquires are relatively
primitive, as befits the primacy of their etiology. Thus, repression and
avoidance are most common, for thereby one escapes the replication
of painful, overwhelming experience. Secondly, splitting is common.
It is very difficult for this shattered self to handle the stress of anxiety,
ambiguity, and ambivalence, so he or she will tend to polarize experi-
ences into all good or all bad. The borderline will enter therapy by ex-
alting the potential embodied by the new therapist, denigrate the former
therapist, and turn on the new therapist as soon as he or she fails to
meet often unrealistic expectations. So, too, in intimate relationships,
the other is all good, but when revealed to be human and flawed, be-
comes all bad, and one must move quickly to the next person to renew
hope.
Because the sense of self is so fragile, he or she cannot hold very much
painful affect. Through the mechanism of projective identification, the
person projects onto others the painful and intense feelings he or she
cannot contain, process, or render conscious. As he or she often fears
the intensity of those affects, he or she will implicitly fear the power of
the other onto whom such energies have been projected. As a projec-
T H E R A P E U T I C I M A G I N I N G S (107)
tion is by definition unconscious, one is not aware that the other whom
I fear is in fact carrying part of my identity. The stalker is a notable
example of a person who is trapped in projective identification, who
has projected onto another an essential part of the self and is anxiously
needy for that missing piece or terrified of owning it in a personal way.
Hence the stalker resists reason, rejection, and even court orders to stay
away from the other for he or she is incapable of internalizing. Usually
such affairs end in sanctions, incarceration, or the object of projection
shifting to someone else, seldom in conscious reflection. Such self-de-
feating behavior is mute testimony to the power of the intrapsychic
imago. What cannot be contained inwardly seemingly must be pur-
sued outwardly. Even more common in borderline behavior is the need
to control the other lest those threatening affects have too large an au-
tonomy.
Hand in hand with repression, splitting, and projection goes denial.
The borderline personality disorder suffers from an impaired capacity
for responsibility, for responsibility requires no small measure of
strength and resilience. In order to avoid the problem of painful or
inconsistent experiences, the person disowns them by saying, "It is never
my fault. You have misunderstood me. You did this or that and caused
all of these problems." One could say that the reality of the borderline
suffers from excess lability rather than consistency, given that his or her
formative experiences no doubt were inconsistent.
Next to nurturance and security, we need consistency in relationships
most if we are to form a sense of self which has consistency as well. As a
compensation for that inconsistent sense of self, the borderline is often
driven to a form of inflation to counterbalance the devalued sense of
self. The other plays too large a role in one's life and therefore one is
obliged to magnify one's own importance, how misunderstood one is,
how much injury has been done to one, or how wonderful one's inten-
tions are.
Most of all, one finds in these personality disorders a resistance to
interpretation, that is, to the conscious acknowledgment and affective
internalization of the dynamics of his or her life. Developing such a
capacity, which is the requisite for growth and change, is often impos-
sible for one with an unstable and fragile sense of self. Even the best
efforts of the therapist will be rejected by this hostile rejoinder, which
is in fact a sad cri de coeur. As one analyst describes it, '"Don't you dare
try to find meaning or make sense of this. There is no meaning and
there will be none.' This is another way of phrasing the motif of de-
spair: ' M y life is bad: Don't you dare see it any other way.'" 6
It is the recalcitrance of the intrapsychic imago, the fallacy of

overgeneralization, which leads to this sad impasse, this repetitive con-
tretemps. The impairment of the ego begets poor impulse control, so
that he or she often acts rashly and reaps painful consequences. The
ego lacks the capacity to tolerate what Freud calls life's normal miser-
ies, the daily experience of anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. The
ego finds little opportunity for sublimation of needs through alterna-
tive paths of gratification and instead tends toward obsessional preoc-
cupation with another person, an imagined slight, or a hunger. A n d he
or she often suffers from a poorly developed superego, that is, a set of
consistent, normative values, for the value system is most often deriva-
tive of obliterating primordial experiences.
We recall Rilke's acknowledgment that the deeper experience of the
present beloved was stirred by the memories of the personal mother.
But he also knew that the personal mother was a bridge to the realm of
the Mothers, that is, to the world of feeling, instinct, body, and world.
So, too often, the person who suffers shattering primordial experience
not only transfers such dynamics to other relationships, and cannot
imagine that these current relationships are possibly unique or differ-
ent, but has extended the power of the imago to all other relationships
as well.
As Rilke evoked the archetypal realm of the mothers, which courses
beneath the renewed guise of intimacy and was mediated for good or
ill by the primordial encounter with the mother, so the personality
disorder is stuck in an archetypal fantasy. The power of the screen which
the imago represents, allied with a diminished personal strength, ex-
tends the primordial hurt, betrayal, and loss to the universe. While such
conclusions are logical, in that they follow a certain primordial se-
quence, as A was, so B shall be, they also bind one to repetitive history.
A l l of us are wounded. Ordinary neurotics are conscious of their
wounds and often conclude that they themselves are their own worst
enemy. The personality disorder is subsumed by the wound, identified
with it, and can literally imagine no other. He or she is caught in a
poverty of imagination. The neurotic tends to take too much respon-
sibility, and the personality disorder, too little. Each suffers, but the
former has a greater capacity for growth given that painful measure of
responsibility. The neurotic has a greater chance of change from i n -
sight, and the personality disorder is best identified by the sad iron wheel
of repeated experiences in which he or she, like Ixion of ancient Greece,
seems cursed by the gods. While one can learn from the discernment
of patterns, the other sees repetition as confirmation, and therefore is
predisposed to replication.
Only two therapeutic hopes survive in the treatment of personality
disorders. As any therapist will confirm, the therapist is often bullied,
manipulated, even vilified by the borderline patient. Therapists tend to
burn out and then feel guilty about their anger toward the patient, who
consistently resists the therapist's best efforts. Change does occur, some-
times, but only when the intrapsychic imago can be reprogrammed, or
better, when an alternative imago of roughly competitive power can be
formed. Since insight is seldom internalized, the continued support of
the ego, repetition, reinforcement, and support will sometimes provide
a reparenting experience. It also allows the formation of, so to speak,
an alternative ego derived from another primordial experience. Sec-
ondly, in moderate to severe personality disorders, the transference is
the analysis. That is, the reparenting experience, based on a positive
transference, when achievable, is more healing than insight itself. The
experience of therapy as the constant context of care creates an alter-
native to the devastation of earlier experience and can, over time, ges-
tate an enlarged sense of self which makes other choices possible. When
one's experience of relationship has caring, affirmation, and constancy,
one may be able to make different choices out of an alternative para-
digm. Sadly, the power of the first, primordial experience is of such
magnitude, that such reparenting, even strongly positive transference,
is difficult at best. The paradox of the personality disorder is that the
extension of personal, ad hoc experience to the archetypal field is illus-
trative of both the power of the fixated image and the impoverishment
of imagination to go beyond it. 7
The patience and compassion of the therapist are sorely tested by
the borderline personality disorder. The therapist is obliged to patiently
repeat clarification ("what issue or dynamic is present here?"), con-
frontation ("why the same response each time?"), and interpretation
("this response comes from what archaic perception?"). And, as Jung
always challenged therapists to do, they must present themselves as life
models, display a more integrated and variegated response to life's
suffering, and show how one can live with courage, dignity, and resil-
ience in a fractious and wounding world.
One illustration may suffice: the story of Marci, a thirty-nine-year-
old schoolteacher. Beautiful, intelligent, gifted, energetic, she was for-
ever miserable. Inside her was a poverty, an emptiness, and an obsessive
hunger, which were expressed by bouts of bulimia and by hurried, fre-
netic, reproachful relationships. She had married early, and divorced
shortly thereafter, an immature man who made money and used co-
caine in ascending order of importance. She had a history of eating
disorders, addictions to alcohol and pills, serial relationships, and two
suicide attempts. She was the daughter of a narcissistic mother who
was neglectful, demanding, and critical and who repeatedly slapped her
about. Marci still called her "Mommy." Her father was passive—his job
was to make money, take care of Mommy, and keep his mouth shut.
Marci entered therapy in the grip of a new obsessional relationship
with Terry, also a passive male still under the thumb of a domineering
father. Terry was afraid to alienate his ex-mate by completing a divorce,
could not confront his father who continued to control his life, and
would not commit to therapy himself. The intrapsychic imago of the
primordial experience continues to have its way with both adults. Terry
is one of many relationships Marci has had, she having chosen precisely
those men who could not be there for her either. Her anger against the
immature parents could not be enacted by the child, so the parental
imagoes were fueled by a subtext of rage which was enacted by her self-
destructive behaviors and her assaults on others. For instance, she tele-
phoned the new girlfriend of her old boyfriend to tell her, falsely, that
he was carrying a venereal disease. At the same time Marci is racked by
a piteous terror of abandonment. She followed her boyfriends, tele-
phoned them incessantly at work, and generally crowded them out of
T H E R A P E U T I C I M A G I N I N G S (Hi)
her life with her incessant need. When asked what she most wished,
she replied, "to be adored."
What is necessary to the child, and remained unfulfilled, persists as
a primitive, obsessional fantasy for the adult. N o one could ever mea-
sure up to that need, especially from the crowd of debilitated lovers
she had assembled. Both by her choice of partners, and her replicative
behaviors, Marci remained chained to the Ixion wheel of repetitive
wounding. The therapy transpired over many years and in time evolved
toward the introjection of a more stable, constant sense of self, and a
more realistic expectation of the other. Her therapy ended with her
marriage to the person who followed Terry. One would like to hope
that her life is freer than ever before from the power of the past and
that the imagination has construed a wider and deeper field in which
to play.
Two other, briefer examples of the constriction of the imagination
which we call personality disorders may suffice. The sociopathic per-
sonality, also known as the antisocial personality, contains its own
Janus-faced dilemma. Wounded by society, it wounds society in return.
He or she can never replace the possibilities inherent in any new rela-
tionship with anything other than the betrayal of the primordial rela-
tionships. The antisocial personality's ever-present challenge is, "If
mother and father could so betray, how could I ever expect anything
different?" Expecting to be wounded ever anew, the sociopath may be
overtly aggressive, or silently charming and manipulative, but relation-
ships are always about controlling the other lest one be controlled.
Among the salient characteristics are the following features which
emanate from a locked-in imago. A sense of personal entitlement is
compensation for generalized feelings of unworthiness and emptiness.
The ready exploitation of others derives from fear of others. Why so
much fear? Because it is primordial, derived from the powerlessness of
the child to defend itself. This historic, reflexive encounter with the
other carries a zero-sum conclusion: I use you, or you will surely use
me. Antisocial acts represent the sociopath's generalization of all the
original destructive dyads to everything and everyone he or she encoun-
ters. Transient relationships, multiple marriages, and the inability to
commit derive from the fear of bonding with the intimate other, ex-
(ll2) A R C H E T Y P A L I M A G I N A T I O N
pecting that other will only repeat the world's wounding. A n impaired
feeling function is ample testimony to a feeling function that was once
overwhelmed.
Most of us can bear later traumatizing experiences and not become
sociopaths because most people generally have a stronger, more resil-
ient ego, allowing us to base our sense of humanity on more benign
paradigms. Demoralizing and devaluing experiences such as impris-
onment in a concentration camp could, of course, be sufficiently dev-
astating to one's sense of self and value system as to overwhelm our
natural capacity to relate to others, as the powerful novel and film The
Pawnbroker demonstrated. Lastly, and most importantly, the inability
to internalize, to compare and contrast, and to image forth other pos-
sibilities is a measure of the magnitude of early devastation of the
nascent ego. One sociopath I knew had repeated marriages and was
abusive in all of them. The terrible paradox of needing the nurturance
of the feminine and at the same time fearing and fighting against it
argued for an early traumatic encounter with the mother. Such per-
sons are hard to like, or hard to find empathy for, but inside is a cower-
ing child whose tears would break our heart if we could but hear them.
The false self of the sociopath, based on abuse and victimization, but-
tressed by fear and rage, with its epiphenomenal behaviors of social
warfare, is a portrait of terrorizing terror which is itself terrified.
The narcissistic personality disorder is often deceptive to us. Such
persons, so vested in control of others, often appear assured and self-
possessed, but therein lies their terrible secret. We recall the ancient
story of the youth Narcissus, who stares into the pool and falls in love
with his own image. We are usually annoyed at narcissists, for we think
they are in love with themselves. In fact, their secret is that when they
stare into the mirror, no one stares back.
All of us are born with the universal need for identity support, which
we acquire through bonding, and mirroring in the faces and behav-
iors of others. From the "mirror" of others we derive a provisional sense
of self, of relative worthiness, and, moreover, an indication of what to
expect from the world. When the caregiver is impaired, depressed per-
haps, or narcissistic also, little affirming energy flows toward the needy
child. He or she then suffers a dramatic deficit, an emotional starva-
tion as it were. He or she will then spend a lifetime seeking solace, seek-
ing love, power, or whatever might fill the terrible emptiness within
and persuade others of his or her worth.
Such a person will look to control others, force them to admire him
or her. When the narcissist is a parent, the children are used as reflec-
tive mirrors to bolster a shaky sense of self. The narcissist in general
tries to split relationships among others, to keep them as spokes on a
wheel joined to one center. If they talk among themselves, compare
notes, and conspire, then the jig is up and they may gather strength to
walk away from the needy parent. Because no child can walk away from
its own nurturant source, it often takes many years for the mature child
to gather strength sufficient to save himself or herself. If a person does
attempt to do so, he or she usually endures a great deal of binding guilt,
recrimination, and many unsuccessful attempts. If a narcissist can find
a dependent personality, as Marci's mother did, then he or she will form
a binding relationship but one whose premise is predicated on the
defense against emptiness.
We all have narcissistic wounds, inflicted because life is unable to
affirm and nurture us when we most need it, but the narcissistic wound
is not as systemic as the narcissistic personality disorder, which is de-
fined by that wound. In the more Jungian language of "the disorder of
self," the provisional sense of self speaks: "I am he or she who is naught.
At mirror's edge I peek timorously, or with bravado, into your eyes to
see what stares back at me. I fear always that nothing will return my
needy gaze. A n d my whole life will be a stratagem to move you into a
reflective position whereby I might hope to become real."
In the last twenty years of the twentieth century, one heard much
about codependence. While it is not yet classified as a personality dis-
order, it might be characterized as a disorder of self. Codependence has
never been included in the DSM, but it was seriously debated at the
last go-round. Given the ubiquity of codependent behavior, such an
inclusion would be a nightmare for insurance companies, for virtually
all of us would be candidates.
As is true for personality disorders, codependence is an expression
of the problem of power. The world, the adult, and the caregiver have
power while the child does not. Power itself is neutral. It is merely the
expression of energy between two entities. When caught in a complex,
it can be demonic. When the world misuses power, the child is obliged
to adapt in profound ways in order to survive. In effect, codependence
is an anxiety disorder because the power of the other is implicit in all
relationships, having been transferred reflexively from the historic to
the contemporary. As one's security lies with the other, so one becomes,
reflexively, defined by the other and one is obliged to adapt one's truth
to serve the demands of that other. One learns to cover one's actual
feelings lest they prove costly in evoking the displeasure of the other.
How many individuals do you know who say something painful, and
then laugh, as if to mask their pain lest they, fearfully, be taken seri-
ously for having uttered their truth?
Codependents tend to be nervous and uncomfortable when alone.
Though they secretly fear others, they have been defined by them and
lose a sense of self when the other is not present. They have generally
learned to be nice, for niceness is universally adaptive and may some-
times even yield rewards. But to be reflexively nice is to continuously
trade one's truth and betray one's integrity, which is not a pretty thing.
Many so-called Codependents Anonymous groups are in fact Recov-
ering Nice Persons Anonymous groups.
Codependents routinely place the needs of others before their own.
Unlike narcissists, they have learned that to get along you go along, and
their own unmet needs are chronic and depressive. To treat this chronic
deficit, they are prone to addictions to soften their pain. They are filled
with shame, excessively modest, and sabotage their visions. They have
learned to keep the peace, usually at all costs. They feel responsible for
the well-being of others. A n d they have difficulties establishing bound-
aries, the demarcations of legitimate self-interest and self-worth. Many
of them grow up to be professional care-givers, such as nurses and so-
cial workers, because they have become deeply identified with the power
of the other and the diminishment of self. They may be martyrs, or
simply always productive persons, but they suffer depression, burnout,
and the anguish of the chronically unmet. What we are describing here
is a disorder of self, for the integrity of the self is repeatedly and will-
fully violated in service to the archaic imago.
Roger was the most codependent man I had ever met. For thirty years
he was married to a narcissistic woman who, even after their divorce,
stalked him, telephoned him in the middle of the night, and sought to
control his second marriage. His second wife was understandably dis-
tressed when wife number one turned up one day and demanded sex
from Roger. Powerless as he was, he consented. Then he was caught in
the codependent's nightmare, trying to please competing claims. He
knew what he had done was wrong, but he had felt powerless to say
no. His therapy involved fundamental reparenting, to give permission
and legitimacy to the personal boundaries, and to counter the terrible
inequities of power which haunt his primordial imagination.
Healing demands the re-imagining of self and world, and it is not
an easy task. The power of the archaic imago accounts for our resis-
tance to change, and thus requires the steady, patient, repetitive work
of therapy. We all would like to believe that if we could heal our envi-
ronment (and some professional caregivers entered their professions
in the fantasy that this was possible), then it would be there for us,
nurturant, protective, and predictable. If we could fix our partners, get
our children to espouse our values, get a better job, acquire more money,
or power, or prestige, then life would be better, would it not?
But healing requires that we become psychological, against our will
in most cases. Our complexes, our neuroses, our personality disorders
all derive from early or especially powerful experience internalized as
mythological systems. It is not that we live in a mythless age. We are all
in service to those mythological imagoes, those charged value systems,
those repetitive world views, which own us and drive us to serve his-
tory. We begin to free ourselves from their archaic powers when we can
ask, amid the detritus of daily life, these questions: What does this ac-
tivate in my history? Where does this come from in me? What is the
pattern, and its source, which I repeat? What is "the wounded wish"
my choices really serve? Such questions are liberating, and to ask them
requires strength and courage, for one can no longer blame someone
else or seek futilely to invent an external world that will heal us.
Healing is the capacity for reimaging our relationship to the Self.
Underneath the sense of self is the Self itself. It is always there, our nature
naturing, seeking to become itself, and it is always expressing its holis-
tic intent. The purpose of therapy, whether in company with a thera-
pist or in a dialogue with ourselves, is to attend the teleological voice
of the Self when it speaks through the venue of the body, through rep-
licative patterns, through compensatory dream image, through the
analysis of complexes, or through the grace of insight and renewing
vision.
The source of the self-disorder is not the Self; it is the power of the
wounding world. The source of renewal is the still, quiet voice of the
Self which may be heard by those who wish to hear, who retain the ca-
pacity to hear, or who are driven to hear. As Jung has noted, the encoun-
ter with the Self is often experienced as a defeat for the ego. So it is in
the experience of defeat that renewal will be found, through a "terrible
grace" in which other images may present themselves to consciousness
and through the yearning for meaning which leads us through pain to
plenitude.
None of us escapes life unscathed, or evades imprisonment by our
reactions and misreadings of life's traumata. H o w difficult, perhaps
impossible, to be in the present unless we are in an instinctual response
or a re-imagined moment. How powerful is what Freud called the rep-
etition compulsion, not only the reflex but the desire to repeat even
wounding history because it is familiar to us. If our friend is our only
friend, and that friend repeatedly betrays us, we may still cling to that
friend rather than face the terror of a great lonely, unformed freedom.
Perhaps the only true pathology is found in denial, for in denial there
is no possible purchase on the present. H o w hard it is to come to re-
sponsibility for our lives, to affirm that:
I am responsible for my history (at least after adolescence).

I am responsible for my personal well-being.
I am responsible for my individuation imperative, from which fear
alone keeps me separated.
In the category of personality disorders one is trapped in the power of

an archetypal imago. For those who remain only neurotic, the identi-
fication with one's defenses is natural but regressive. Each of us is pre-
sented with a riddle, just as the novice receives in the koan of the Zendo:
"What you have become is now your problem!" What we have as-
sembled, necessarily, now stands in the way, and we are obliged to risk
new attitudes, behaviors, and much larger visions.
Strange as it may seem, we have to invent a "second adulthood" as a
necessary fiction, even as the hackneyed "inner child" was invented to
acknowledge the power of history. What was too large for that child is
now the agenda for the adult. The adult has greater ego strength, ca-
pacity for reflection and objectivity, and alternative possibilities
unavailable to the child. What restrains us is fear, for sure, and the con-
straints of the imagination. None of us can escape psycho-pathology,
the ubiquitous wounds to the soul, and the distortions of our natural
paths which result. The invitation is to summon courage to take on
the world anew, to relinquish outmoded identities and defenses, and
risk a radical re-imagining of the larger possibilities of the world and
of self.
There are lame gods in this world, as Stephen Dunn poetically il-
lustrates, and there are wounded gods at the heart of every soul, as Jung
tells us. But the mystery of psyche pulsates and permutates—every time
we look in the mirror we are different, and the mirror is different, and
wheresoever dying is done, birth is born. As poet Edward Hirsch muses,
One thinks of the gods dissolving in mid-air

And the towering stillness of a cathedral at dawn.
Raindrops break the watery skin ofponds

And ponds are shattered mirrors of the absolute}
AFTERWORD
C^Jle-c^maqininq the (^>oul
beyond our grasp. Thus, as the meaning-seeking, meaning- creating
species, we depend on the image which arises out of depth encounters.
This image, as we have seen, is not itself divine, though it carries and is
animated by the eternal exchange of that energy which we may call
divine. The husk which such energy inhabits is perishable, as we know
our own bodies to be. While we would understandably cling to that
husk, be it this body, or this ego-concept, or this god, we would be better
served trying to hold the ocean in our hands.
The deep stir and tumult has another source, and another end, be-
yond that which our limited consciousness could ever frame. Yet the
fragile reed, as Blaise Pascal reminded us, is a "thinking reed" and cou-
rageously conjures with that infinity which could so casually destroy
it. That disparity, the longing for eternity and the limits of finitude, is
our dilemma, the conscious suffering of which is also what most marks
our species. It is the symbolic capacity which defines us uniquely. The
images which arise out of the depths, be they the burning bush of bib-
lical imagery, the complaint of the body, or the dream we dream to-
night, link us to that throbbing, insistent hum which is the sound of
the eternal. As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing
in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to
the great sea which surges within us as well.
We perforce recall that psyche and soul have been split in our time,
the former assigned to the uneasy calculations of the psychologists, the
latter to the rigid fingers of the theologians. Yet, surely, the two are one,
for what most deeply affects our relationship to depth, to the gods,
permeates our being. The flight of the psychologists from the large-
ness of this agenda is a form of moral cowardice, and the attempt of
much theology to protect us from religious experience is shameful. For
both, the reality of the soul is suspect, fearfully avoided, and contrib-
utes to the diminution of the spiritual potential of the individual. Who
among us has been encouraged to wonder at "the starry skies above
and the moral law within," as Kant did? Jung certainly did. In a 1945
letter he writes,
I know it is exceedingly difficult to write anything definite or de-

scriptive about the progression of psychological states. It always
seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events
characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the
main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of
neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the
fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and
inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are re-
leased from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on
a numinous character. 1
Even the disease takes on a numinous character! You will not find that
sentence in the DSM-IV, and that is what is wrong with modern psy-
chology—it has no soul, that is, no depth, and is unintentionally de-
meaning to the person and his or her own high calling. Moreover, as
Jung says, the approach to the numinous is the real therapy. Thus any
therapist, any cleric who does not suffer and persist in a personal en-
gagement with the problem of meaning, with the forever transforming
numinous, cannot be said to be part of a healing or enlarging process.
While describing and counting behaviors may be provisionally use-
ful and certainly contribute to statistics, such an approach to psychol-
ogy may prove an unwitting contrivance to avoid the numinous. One
recalls the wry observation of Benjamin Disraeli who said that there
are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. It is for this reason
that Jungian psychology has sought its grounding in myth, the Marchen,
alchemical texts, and other suspect sources. As Richard Tarnas observes,
the transcendent may be "approached through myth and the poetic
imagination, as well as by attending to a kind of aesthetic resonance
( 120 ) A F T E R W O R D
within the psyche touched off by the presence of the archetypal in veiled
form with the phenomenal world." 2
The release from pathology is by numinous encounter, which may

shatter the ego states but which brings one into enlarged experience.
This movement of psyche is best discerned in the creative act of myth,
dream, and fantasy. The limits of our condition were well expressed by
Protagoras twenty-five hundred years ago: "Concerning the gods, I have
no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what form they
are; for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the
obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life." 3
Our dilemma is even more dramatically described by the Thai Bud-

dhist monk Ajahn Chah:
Nowhere in the world is there any real peace to be found. The

poor have no peace and neither do the rich. Adults have no peace,
children have no peace, the poorly educated have no peace, and
neither do the highly educated. There is no peace anywhere. That
is the nature of the world.
Those who have few possessions suffer and so do those who have
many. Children, adults, the aged, everyone suffers. The suffering
of being old, the suffering of being young, the suffering of being
wealthy, and the suffering of being poor—it's all nothing but
suffering.... Every single moment we are undergoing birth and
death. That is the way things are. 4
Yet all around are what Wordsworth called intimations of immortal-

ity—intimations, not certainties, but nonetheless real. When Jesus said
that his kingdom was spread all over the earth and we did not see it,
and Paul Eluard asserted that the other world, the invisible world, is this
one, then, in the midst of finitude, death, and suffering, there is still
something which beckons, something which summons us to enlarged
vocation. Jung defines the imperative of individuation as a vocation. It
is, he says, "an irrational factor which destines a man to emancipate
himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality
is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God . . . but vocation
acts like a law of God from which there is no escape." 5
R E - I M A G I N I N G T H E S O U L (l2l)
What summons us forth, then, is the image which is not the divine
but for the moment contains the numinous. We recall that for Jung,
the archetypal shaping process is not only the work of instinct, though
it is surely that to some extent, but also the shaping of energy into
images which have spiritual import. Such images arise autonomously
out of depth experience and may be found in the cataclysmic metanoia
of Saul on the road to Damascus, in the metarealistic topography of
dreamscapes, or in the lowliest of creatures, as we remember the humble
dung beetle, scarab of the sacred. For us to re-collect the soul, to re-
member psyche, we are enjoined to the contemplation of the poet rather
than the pathologist and the artist rather than the psychologist.
Poet Stephen Dunn summons such an encounter with the transcen-
dent through the image of the lowliest of creatures, the common fly, in
a poem titled "The Resurrection."
The poet has been sitting, waiting for the uncertain muse to make
its appearance on a winter's day. N o t h i n g . . . his eye catches a fly whose
somnolence has been stirred by the warming room and which now
begins to stir and flit about. Something within the poet also stirs at this
simplest of events; the archetypal imagination is activated toward a
dramaturgy deeper than the mundane character of the object itself. It
tumbles over the banal into the divine; it is
a phenomenon that could turn a hoy

from street crime to science
or, if less bright, to the church.
He is captured by the fly relearning flight, pushing against the window,

with its little fly's heart. His blood stirred by some ancient tremor, some
archetypal ceremony, Dunn decides that he has been summoned to be
the poet of this fly, for all things great and small surely deserve a wit-
ness to their troubled transit.
As a conscious being, Dunn knows what the fly cannot yet know, that
the room is finite, that the respite is fleeting, and that cold death still
waits beyond the warm room. A n d the archetypal analogues are ines-
capable. We, the most fleeting, as Rilke reminded us, like the fly rise from
torpor and fling ourselves against the transparent limits of desire.
(l22) A F T E R W O R D
To be a fly
was to fly in the face
of all that could defeat it,
and there was the pleasure of shit
to look forward to, the pleasure of bothering
cows and people, the pleasure ofpure speed.
Being here, we, too, are the most transient of beings, humming and
buzzing from shit to aesthetics. Then the poet sees other flies rise and
dash about madly. He concludes that, for now at least, he has been sum-
moned to be the
... poet offlies in winter

as they sought the other side
of the glass, which was death,
victims of having once risen, ignorant
buggers, happy on bad evidence, warm, abuzz.''
We, ignorant buggers, happy on bad evidence, warm, abuzz for now,
are stirred by the lowliest creatures, for in their story the gods are pass-
ing and the deepest drama of which we too are a passing part. O n the
other side of the transparent windows lies cold death, but for now there
is only the joy of this furious buzzing we call life. Each of our neuroses
is wrapped around this paradox, as a defense against it, an ignorant
protest, or a secret collusion.
How could we be lifted from our pathologies, Jung asked, if we are
not imaginatively open to the depth of those energies which both
conflate us and tumble us i n harness to the sea? The approach to the
numinous, he insisted, is the true therapy. It will no more spare us suffer-
ing or death than the other buzzing buggers which have been a mo-
ment on this earth. But, by way of the archetypal imagination, these
buzzing buggers of which we are a part have intimations of immortal-
ity, are participants in a recurrent eschatological drama, and bring their
small individuated piece to the great mosaic.
What we wish most to know, most desire, remains unknowable and
lies beyond our grasp. The sea changes of the soul are swiff and sure and
R E - I M A G I N I N G T H E S O U L ( 123 )
the powers of darkness many, but the gods still speak through the natu-
ral forms, through the mysterious dream-maker, and through the ar-
chetypal imagination. Our hope and task should be that we might
humbly learn to petition the gods again, as in the short supplication of
a "Stone from Delphi," by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus
Heaney:
To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south
and I make a morning offering again:
that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,
govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god
until he speaks in my untrammeled mouth. 7
( 124 ) A F T E R W O R D
(Bootes
Foreword
1. A n t h o n y Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self ( N e w York: Ballantine B o o k s ,

1988).
2. Joan C h o d o r o w , I n t r o d u c t i o n to C . G . Jung, Jung on Active Imagination
(Princeton, N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 1.
3. Ibid., p p . 2-20.
4. See Verena Kast, Joy, Inspiration, and Hope (College Station: Texas A & M
University Press, 1991); T h o m a s M o o r e , Care of the Soul ( N e w York:
H a r p e r C o l l i n s , 1992); James H i l l m a n , The Soul's Code: In Search of Charac-
ter and Calling ( N e w York: Warner Books, 1997); M i h a l y C s i k s z e n t m i h a l y i ,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience ( N e w York: HarperPerennial,
1990); D a v i d H . Rosen and M i c h a e l C . Luebbert, eds., Evolution of the
Psyche (Westport, C o n n . : Praeger Publishers, 1999); and A n t h o n y Stevens
a n d John Price, Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning ( N e w York and
L o n d o n : Routledge, 1996).
5. Alice Walker, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult ( N e w York:
Scribner, 1996), p. 13.
Introduction. Archetypal Imaginings: The Golden

String Which Leads to Heaven's Gate
1. T h o m a s Nashe, " A Litany i n the T i m e o f Plague," i n The Norton Anthology

of Poetry, 3rd ed., ed. Alexander A l l i s o n et al. (New York: N o r t o n , 1983),
p. 202.
2. For a relatively m o d e r n example o f Jung being identified w i t h L a m a r c k i s m ,
see H e n r i F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious ( N e w York: Basic
Books, 1970), p p . 760ft . 0
3. W i l l i a m Blake, letter to Rev. D r . Trusler, i n The Poetry and Prose of William
Blake, ed. D a v i d V. E r d m a n (Garden City, N . Y . : Doubleday, 1965), p. 677.
4. Blake, "Letter to T h o m a s Butts," i n The Poetry and Prose of William Blake,
P- 693-
5. Blake, " T h e L a o c o o n , " i n The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 271.
6. This exchange took place d u r i n g H u s t o n Smith's presentation at a confer-
ence titled "Reflections of the Spirit," held at the University of H o u s t o n ,
H o n o r s College, September, 1998.
7. W i l l i a m W o r d s w o r t h , " L i n e s : C o m p o s e d a Few M i l e s above T i n t e r n A b -
bey," i n The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 525.
8. Blake, "Jerusalem," i n The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 229.
Chapter 1. Religious Imaginings: Divine Morphologies
1. E d w a r d H i r s c h , "At the Grave of Wallace Stevens," i n Earthly Measures: Po-

ems ( N e w York: A l f r e d A . K n o p f , 1994), p. 80.
2. Robert Frost, "Desert Places," i n Modern Poems: An Introduction to Poetry,
ed. R i c h a r d E U m a n n and Robert O ' C l a i r ( N e w York: N o r t o n , 1976), p. 80.
3. Z o r a Neale H u r s t o n , Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; reprint, N e w
York: H a r p e r and Row, 1990), p. 183.
4. C . G . Jung, Letters (Princeton, N . J . : P r i n c e t o n University Press, 1973), 2:569.
5. See C . G . Jung, Alchemical Studies, i n The Collected Works, ed. F. C . H u l l

(Princeton, N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1973), 13:37 (hereafter cited by
i n d i v i d u a l title w i t h CWvolume and page n u m b e r ) .
6. T. S. Eliot, " T h e H o l l o w M a n , " i n T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays
( N e w York: H a r c o u r t , Brace, and W o r l d , 1962), p. 58.
7. C . G . Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A n i e l a Jaffe ( N e w York: P a n -

theon B o o k s , 1963), p. 340.
8. Dante A l i g h i e r i , The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. D o r o t h y Sayers ( N e w
York: Basic B o o k s , 1962), p. 347.
9. See Jung, Psychological Types, C W 6:480.
10. See, e.g., Jung, Psychology and Religion: East and West, C W 11:330.
11. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9:63.

12. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 340.
13. Jung, Aion, CW 9:180.
( 126 ) N O T E S T O P A G E S 7-17
j
14- Eliot, " T h e H o l l o w M e n , " p. 212.
15. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5:308.
16. Jung, The Symbolic Life, C W 18:275.
17. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9:14-15.
18. F r o m the gnostic sayings of Jesus as cited by Joseph C a m p b e l l i n The Masks
of God: Occidental Mythology ( N e w York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 364.
19. C a r l Kerenyi, Zeus and Hera: Archetypal Image of Father, Husband, and Wife
(Princeton, N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1975), p. x i i i .
20. G e r a r d M a n l e y H o p k i n s , " P i e d Beauty," i n The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
p. 876.
21. Kerenyi, Zeus and Hera, p. 5.

22. Jung, Letters, 2:525.
23. Wallace Stevens, "Sunday M o r n i n g , " i n The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 931.
24. Jung, Archetypes and the Collected Unconscious, C W 9 : 6 .
25. I b i d .
26. Ibid., p. 7.
27. Kerenyi, Zeus and Hera, p. xiv.
28. I a m indebted for some of this i n f o r m a t i o n to Jungian therapist R o n n i e
L a n d a u o f Philadelphia.
29. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
( N e w York: M a c m i l l a n , 1951), p. 3.
30. Jung, Psychological Types, C W 6:480.
Chapter 2. Literary Imaginings: Envisioned Logos
1. Kerenyi, Zeus and Hera, p. xiv.
2. Rainer M a r i a Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of
Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen M i t c h e l l ( N e w York: M o d e r n Library,
1995). P- 550.
3. Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Walter L o w r i e (Princeton, N . J . :
Princeton University Press, 1944), 1:15.
4. Unless otherwise noted, this a n d subsequent quotations are f r o m Rilke's
" T h i r d Elegy" a n d are translated by the author.
5. Q u o t e d i n Brenda M a d d o x , Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (Boston,
Mass.: H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n , 1988), p. 301.
N O T E S T O P A G E S I7-38 ( 127 )
6. Jonathan Edwards, Selected Writings of Jonathan Edwards, ed. H a r o l d
S i m o n s o n ( N e w York: Waveland Press, 1992), p. 103.
7. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW5:355~56.

8. W . B. Yeats, " N i n e t e e n H u n d r e d and Nineteen," i n Selected Poems and Two
Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. M . L . Rosenthal ( N e w York: M a c m i l l a n ,
1962), p. 109.
9. D y l a n T h o m a s , " F e r n H i l l , " i n The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 1181.
10. Unless otherwise noted, this and subsequent quotations are f r o m Rilke's
" N i n t h Elegy" a n d are translated by the author.
11. Jung's Answer to fob is f o u n d i n Psychology and Religion, v o l . 11 of The Col-
lected Works.
12. C i t e d by M i t c h e l l i n Rilke, Ahead of All Parting, p. 568.

13. A r c h i b a l d M a c L e i s h , " N o t M a r b l e N o r G i l d e d M o n u m e n t s , " i n Poems,
1924-1933 (Boston and N e w York: H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n , 1933), p. 48.
14. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 326.

15. C i t e d by M i t c h e l l i n Rilke, Ahead of All Parting, pp. 569-70.
16. I take part of the title o f this section f r o m an essay, " O n the N a m i n g of the
G o d s i n H o l d e r l i n and Rilke," written by m y graduate advisor and mentor
Stanley R o m a i n e H o p p e r , dean o f the Graduate School of D r e w University.
I offer this chapter i n h o n o r o f his great teaching.
17. F r i e d r i c h H o l d e r l i n , " P a t m o s , " m y translation.
18. St. Augustine, Confessions (Washington, D . C . : C a t h o l i c University Press,
1967), p. 34-
19. M a r t i n Heidegger, " H o l d e r l i n and the Essence o f Poetry," i n Existence and

Being ( L o n d o n : V i s i o n Press, 1949), p. 312.
20. Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6:190.
21. Rilke, "I F i n d Y o u i n A l l Things," author's translation.
22. Rilke, "Lament," i n A n g e l Flores, trans., An Anthology of German Poetry
from Holderlin to Rilke in English Translation (Garden City, N . Y . : A n c h o r
Books, i 9 6 0 ) , p. 386.
23. I b i d .
24. Rilke, " A u t u m n , " i n Flores, trans., An Anthology of German Poetry, p. 390.
25. R i l k e , " N o w is the time w h e n the G o d s emerge," author's translation.
26. Ibid.
27. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9:62; Mysterium
Coniunctionis, CWi4:546.
(l28) N O T E S T O P A G E S 39-57
28. Rilke, " N o w is the time w h e n the G o d s emerge."
29. Ibid.
30. Yeats, " T w o Songs f r o m a Play," i n The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 114.
Chapter3. Incarnational Imaginings:

The Painter's Eye on Eternity
1. James H i l l m a n , The Dream and the Underworld (New York: H a r p e r a n d

Row, 1979), p. 27.
2. James H i l l m a n , Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: H a r p e r a n d Row, 1975),
p. 169.
3. Ibid., p. 154.
4. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, C W i 5 : i o i .
5. Rilke, "Love Song," i n Flores, trans., An Anthology of German Poetry, p. 391.
6. N a n c y W i t t , On Alternate Days ( A s h l a n d , V a . : Cross M i l l Gallery, 1995), p. 6.
7. N a n c y W i t t , personal c o m m u n i c a t i o n w i t h the author.
8. Ibid.
9. Jung, " T h e Psychological F o u n d a t i o n for the Belief i n Spirits," i n The Struc-
ture and Dynamics of the Psyche, C W 8:301.
10. Ibid., p. 304.
11. Ibid., p. 309.
12. Ibid., p. 315.
13. W i t t , personal communication.

14. Ibid.
15. Wallace Stevens, " A H i g h - t o n e d O l d C h r i s t i a n W o m a n , " i n Modern Poems,
ed. E l l m a n n a n d O ' C l a i r , p. 90.
16. W i t t , On Alternate Days, p. 29.
17. Jung, The Symbolic Life, C W i 8 : 4 5 i .
18. G e r a r d M a n l e y H o p k i n s , " T h e W i n d h o v e r , " i n A Hopkins Reader (New
York: A n c h o r - D o u b l e d a y , 1966), p. 50.
19. W i t t , On Alternate Days, p. 81.

20. Stephen D u n n , " T h e G u a r d i a n A n g e l , " i n New and Selected Poems: 1974-
1994 (New York: N o r t o n , 1994), p. 204.
N O T E S T O P A G E S 57-98 ( 129 )
Chapter 4- Therapeutic Imaginings:
Psychopathology and Soul
1. D u n n , " I n t r o d u c t i o n to the 20th Century," i n New and Selected Poems:
1974-1994, P- 83.
2. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, C W 8:125.
3. Ibid., p. 23.
4. Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW4:278.
5. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, C W 16:313.
6. N a t h a n Schwartz-Salant, The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing
(Wilmette, 111.: C h i r o n Publications, 1989), p. 29.
7. Such impoverishment o f the i m a g i n a t i o n is the source o f racism a n d big-
otry, for the bigot cannot imagine any variant f r o m the stereotype he o r
she carries. To imagine the p a i n o f the other (sym-pathy) is to experience
once's o w n h u m a n i t y i n the other.
8. H i r s c h , " A t the Grave of Wallace Stevens," i n Earthly Measures, p. 80.
Afterword. Re-Imagining the Soul
1. I m m a n u a l Kant, Critique of Practical Reason ( N e w York: M a c m i l l a n , 1992),

p. 84; Jung, Letters, 1:377.
2. R i c h a r d Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas

That Have Shaped Our World View ( N e w York: Ballantine Books, 1991),
P- 54-
3. C i t e d i n i b i d . , p. 28.
4. A j a h n C h a h , " O u r Real H o m e , " i n Entering the Stream: An Introduction to
the Buddha and His Teachings, ed. Samuel Bercholz a n d Sherab C h o d z i n
K o h n (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1993), pp. 95-96.
5. Jung, The Development of Personality, CW 17:175-76.
6. Stephen D u n n , " T h e Resurrection," i n New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994,
p. 31.
7. Seamus Heaney, "Stone f r o m D e l p h i , " i n Opened Ground: Selected Poems,
1966-1996 ( N e w York: Farrar, Straus a n d G i r o u x , 1998), p. 207.
(130) N O T E S T O P A G E S 99-124
Blake, W i l l i a m . The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by D a v i d V.
E r d m a n . G a r d e n City, N . Y . : Doubleday, 1965.

C h a h , A j a h n . " O u r Real H o m e . " In Entering the Stream: An Introduction to the
Buddha and His Teachings. Edited by Samuel Bercholz and Sherab C h o d z i n
K o h n . Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1993.

C h o d o r o w , Joan. Introduction to C . G . Jung, Jung on Active Imagination..
Princeton, N . J . : Princetoji University Press, 1997.
Csikszentmihalyi, M i h a l y . Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. N e w
York: HarperPerennial, 1990.
Diagnostic Criteria from DSM-IV. Washington, D . C . : A m e r i c a n Psychiatric
Association, 1994.
D u n n , Stephen. New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994. N e w York: N o r t o n , 1994.
Eliot, T. S. T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays. N e w York: H a r c o u r t , Brace,
and W o r l d , 1962.
Flores, A n g e l , trans. An Anthology of German Poetry from Holderlin to Rilke.
G a r d e n City, N . Y . : A n c h o r Books, i960.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. N e w
York: M a c m i l l a n , 1951.
Heidegger, M a r t i n . Existence and Being. L o n d o n : V i s i o n Press, 1949.
H i l l m a n , James. The Dream and the Underworld. N e w York: H a r p e r and Row,
1979-
. Re-Visioning Psychology. N e w York: H a r p e r and Row, 1975.
. The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling. N e w York: Warner
Books, 1997.
H i r s c h , E d w a r d . Earthly Measures: Poems. N e w York: A l f r e d A . K n o p f , 1994.
Jung, C a r l Gustav. The Collected Works. 20 vols. Edited by F. C . H u l l . Princeton,
N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1973.
. Letters. 2 vols. Princeton, N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1973.
. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by A n i e l a Jaffe. N e w York:
Pantheon Books, 1963.
Kant, I m m a n u e l . Critique of Practical Reason. N e w York: M a c m i l l a n , 1992.
Kast, Verena. Joy, Inspiration, and Hope. College Station: Texas A & M University
Press, 1991.
Kerenyi, C a r l . Zeus and Hera: Archetypal Image of Father, Husband, and Wife.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or, Volume 1. Translated by Walter L o w r i e . Princeton,
N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1944.
M o o r e , T h o m a s . Care of the Soul. N e w York: H a r p e r C o l l i n s , 1992.
Rilke, Rainer M a r i a . Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer
Maria Rilke. Translated by Stephen M i t c h e l l . N e w York: M o d e r n Library, 1995.
Rosen, D a v i d H . , a n d M i c h a e l C . Luebbert, eds. Evolution of the Psyche.
Westport, C o n n . : Praeger Publishers, 1999.

Schwartz-Salant, N a t h a n . The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing.
W i l m e t t e , 111.: C h i r o n Publications, 1989.
Stevens, A n t h o n y , and John Price. Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning.
N e w York and L o n d o n : Routledge, 1996.
Storr, A n t h o n y . Solitude: A Return to the Self. N e w York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That
Have Shaped Our World View. N e w York: Ballantine Books, 1991.
W i t t , Nancy. On Alternate Days. A s h l a n d , V a . : Cross M i l l Gallery, 1995.
( 132 ) B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Q/n&ex
Alighiere, Dante, 15,60, 63, 96,126H 8 D u n n , Stephen, 98,99,100,118,122,

allopathy, 8, 9 129,130
Answer to Job (Jung), 47
archetype, 5, 6,17,18,25,42,55, 62,87, Edwards, Jonathan, 39,128
88,100,110,122 E l i o t , T h o m a s Stearns, 14,17,24,46,
A r m s t r o n g , L o u i s , 59 73,103,126,127
art: c r i t i c i s m of, 60, 61, 64; recent Ellenberger, H e n r i , 12577 2
history of, 60, 61, 63, 88; superior- E l u a r d , Paul, 4, 83,121
ity to psychology, 61 existentialism, 43
expressive arts, 9,11
Baylor College of M e d i c i n e , 9
B a r t h , K a r l , 19 Flaubert, Gustave, 3
Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 6 Frazer, James George, 31,1277? 29
Blake, W i l l i a m , 4,7,12,20,26, 64,68, Freud, S i g m u n d , 36,41,61,71,75,109,
89, 9 8 , 1 2 6 « « 3 , 4,5, 8 117
Frost, Robert, 13,14,126 n 2
C . G . Jung E d u c a t i o n a l Center o f
H o u s t o n , Texas, Inc., 8 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 31
C a m p b e l l , Joseph, 127 G r i m m , August a n d W i l h e l m , 30
C h a n , A j a h n , 121,130 n 4
C h o d o r o w , Joan, x i , 125 n 2 Heany, Seamus, 124,130 n 7
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6, 49 Heidegger, M a r t i n , 54,128 n 19
complex, 41, 42,74,75,116 Hemingway, Ernest, 60
consciousness, c o n t r i b u t i o n of, 47, Hermes Trismegisthus ( T h o t h ) , 15,
48, 52,54,117,118 55
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 7 H i l l m a n , James, 61, 62,101,125,129
H i r s c h , E d w a r d , 13,14,48,118,126 n 1,
d a i m o n , 24,25,36, 51,68 13071 8
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV H o l d e r l i n , F r i e d r i c h , 54, 84,128 n 17
( D S M - I V ) , 101,103,114,120 homeopathy, 8
Disraeli, B e n j a m i n , 120 H o p k i n s , G e r a r d M a n l e y , 20, 96,12771
Duino Elegies (Rilke), x i i ; Ninth Elegy, 20,129n 18
46-53; Third Elegy, 37-46 H o p p e r , Stanley R o m a i n e , 128 n 16
H o w e l l , Frank, 65 MacLeish, A r c h i b a l d , 49, 50,53, nSn 13
H u r s t o n , Z o r a Neale, 14,126M 3 M a d d o x , Brenda, 1270 5
magic, 33; contagious, 32; s y m p a -
i m a g i n a t i o n , 6 , 7 , 4 9 , 5 8 , 61,62, 64,67, thetic, 31,32
110,112,123 M a r i a Prophetissa, 69
imago Dei, 48 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung),
14
Jaspers, K a r l , 17 metaphor, 4,5, 6,7, 8,13,14,20,21,25,
Jesus o f Nazareth, 19,55, 86, 96,121 48, 54,60, 61, 62, 90, 99,100
Joyce, James, 38, 61 M o o r e , H e n r y , 65
Jung, C a r l Gustav, 125-30: active m y t h , 14,15,17, 24, 41, 51, 53, 68, 75, 86,
i m a g i n a t i o n of, x i ; alchemy, 105,116
interest i n , 86; a n d approach to m y t h o l o g e m , 24,30,31,41,42, 86
n u m i n o u s , 120,123; conscious-
ness, task of, 47, 50,51,52, 54; Nashe, T h o m a s , 3,125^11
creative aspects o f illness, x i ; N e w Grange (Ireland), 29
criticism of art, 61,64; definitions N e w t o n , Isaac, 7
of G o d , 21,38,57; o n dreams, 45; Nietzsche, F r i e d r i c h , 58
fate, 57; i n d i v i d u a t i o n , idea of, 44,
94,117,121; motto at h o m e , 38; Pascal, Blaise, 27, 84,119
m y t h as revelation of divine life, Pater, Walter, 57
15,17, 22; neurosis, definition of, personality, disorders of, 107,108,109,
16, 22,36, 99; poets, role of, 54; 110; borderline, 107-12; co-depen-
psyche as h o l o g r a m , 32; psychol- dence, 114-16; healing of, 116-18;
ogy, last invented, 14, 24; religious narcissistic, 113-14; sociopathic,
projection, 24; Self, the, 45; s p i r i - 112-13
tual poverty, 18; symbolic life, the, Picasso, Pablo, 5, 61, 83
18,34; transcendent f u n c t i o n , 15, Plato, 62, 84
94; vocation, 121 projective identification, 108
Protagoras, 121
Kafka, Franz, 63,64 Psychological Foundation for the Belief
Kant, Immanual, 7,11,61,71,120,130H1 in Spirits, (Jung), 75
Kerenyi, C a r l , 20, 21, 22,25,35,127M/1 psychology: b a n k r u p t c y of, 16,17, 53,
19,21, 27 58, 61,100,102,119,120; depth
Kierkegaard, Soren, 37, i27n 3 approach, 54,88,100,103,104;
d i v i d i n g o f the person, 16,53;
L a m a r c k i s m , 5,1257? 2 subjective confession of, 86; task
L a n d a u , R o n n i e , nyn 28 of, 71,100,102,103,120; youngest
Levi-Strauss, C l a u d e , 28 o f sciences, 14, 24
L e v y - B r u h l , L u c i e n , 28 psychopathology, 100,105,106,117,
Locke, John, 6 120
( 134 ) INDEX
religion: etymology of, 22; greatest Tarnas, R i c h a r d , 120,121,13071 2
ideas of, 30; m o d e r n context of, Thales, 20
54; psychological d i m e n s i o n of, Theosophical Society, 31
24; subjective confession of, 86 T h o m a s , D y l a n , 28, 47,128119
Rilke, Rainer M a r i a , x i i , 6,67,79,127; T i l l i c h , P a u l , 30
biography of, 35; themes of, 35
Vaihinger, H a n s , 10
St. Augustine, 54,128
Schliemann, H e i n r i c h , 30 Wagner, R i c h a r d , 37,52
Schwartz-Salant, N a t h a n , 130 n 6 Walker, A l i c e , x i i i , 125 n 5
Shakespeare, W i l l i a m , 39, 49, 98 Whitehead, A l f r e d N o r t h , 21
S m i t h , H u s t o n , 7,126 n 6 W h i t m a n , Walt, 41
speech, constituent power of, 6 , 4 9 , W i t t , N a n c y : "Bailey W o n , " 91-94;
51.54 biography of, 62,63, 64,65,71,78,
spiritual malaise, 75,100,101,120 91,97; " C a p r o n , " 71-76; "Chalice,"
Stanford University, 9 80; "Cicatrice," 94-96; "Glass
Stevens, Wallace, 22, 88, 89,12771 23, Darkly," 88-90; "Inside," 68-71;
1297115 metarealism of, 63,64; " O p e n i n g , "
Storr, A n t h o n y , x i , 125711 65-68; " P a i n t i n g , " 90; " R h y t o n , "
s y m b o l , 4,7,12,13,16, 25, 26,34,48, 86-88; " R i n g o f Fire," 96-98;
54. 60,73, 90,119 " S e c o n d O p e n i n g , " 84-86; "Sue's
Symbols of Transformation (Jung), Fan," 76-80; " W i n d o w s , " 80-83
32 W o r d s w o r t h , W i l l i a m , 7, 8,126M 7
Taoism, x i Yeats, W i l l i a m Butler, 43, 58,12871 8,

Taos Pueblo, 15 129713
I N D E X (135)
D a v i d H. Rosen, G e n e r a l E d i t o r
T E X A S A & M U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Beebe, John. Integrity in Depth, 1992.
Kast, Verena. Joy, Inspiration, and Hope, 1991.

K a w a i , Hayao. Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, 1996.
Stein, M u r r a y . Transformation: Emergence of the Self, 1998.
Stevens, A n t h o n y . The Two Million-Year-Old Self, 1993.
W o o d m a n , M a r i o n . The Stillness Shall Be the Dancing: Feminine and Masculine
in Emerging Balance (audio), 1994.

Young-Eisendrath, Polly. Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora, 1997.
hat we wish to know, and most desire, remains unknowable
and lies beyond our grasp." W i t h these words, James Hollis
leads readers to consider the nature of our human need for meaning in life
and for connection to a world less limiting than our own.
In The Archetypal Imagination, Hollis offers a lyrical Jungian appreciation
of the archetypal imagination. He argues that without the human mind's
ability to form energy-filled images that link us to worlds beyond our
rational and emotional capacities, we would have neither culture nor
spirituality. Drawing upon the work of poets and philosophers, Hollis shows
the importance of depth experience, meaning, and connection to an "other"
world. Just as humans have instincts for biological survival and social
interaction, we have instincts for spiritual connection as well. Just as our
physical and social needs seek satisfaction, so the spiritual instincts of the
human animal are expressed in images we form to evoke an emotional or
spiritual response, as in our dreams, myths, and religious traditions.
The author draws upon the work of the poet Rainer M a r i a Rilke,
particularly his Duino Elegies, to elucidate the archetypal imagination in
literary forms. To underscore the importance of incarnating depth
experience, he also examines a series of paintings by Nancy Witt.
W i t h the power of the archetypal imagination available to all of us, we
are invited to summon courage to take on the world anew, to relinquish
outmoded identities and defenses, and to risk a radical re-imagining o
the larger possibilities of the world and of the self.
"This book on archetypal imagination is a feast of poetic and artistic refer

ences to the numinosity of the imagination."
—The Journal of Analytical Psychology
J A M E S H O L L I S is a Jungian analyst and executive director of the C. G

Jung Educational Center of Houston.
in Analytical Psychol*
$16.95
ISBN-13:
ISBN-ID: 15fiS4MEbflE
Texas A & M University Press
College Station
www.tamu.edu/upress

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^(yhe <B^lrchetypal

Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology

Foreword by David H. Rosen

TEXAS A & M UNIVERSITY PRESS

T h e paper used i n this b o o k

For a complete list of books in print in this series,

1. Archetype (Psychology) 2 . Imagination

Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology

Paintings by Nancy Witt

Imagination is more important than information.

This book on archetypal imagination is critically needed medicine in

written, "Jung's analytic method is based upon the [innate] healing

same thing as creative imagination) requires a meditative state in which

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

An uncommon degree of imagination

In chapter 2, "Literary Imaginings," Hollis utilizes two of Rainer Maria

Everything you can imagine is real.

In chapter 3, "Incarnational Imaginings," Hollis leads us to an under-

Alice Walker has said:

The Golden String Which Leads to Heaven's Gate

Brightness falls from the air.

Rather, Jung speaks of the archetype as a formative process, more prop-

ARCHETYPAL IMAGININGS (5)

Romantics, imagination is our highest faculty, not our reason, which

his dynamic metaphor for the cosmos, he despised the mechanistic

Huston Smith, a historian of religion, once asked me this question:

a motion and a spirit, that impels

ARCHETYPAL IMAGININGS (7)

A practical manifestation of this process of archetypal imagining and

ARCHETYPAL IMAGININGS (9)

I give you the end of a golden string,

// horses... had hands, or were able to draw with their

cation of "white tears," the grieving over lost certainties—all intimate

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Frost's evocation of images which summon affect and point beyond

"dis-location." In this existential chasm depth psychology necessarily

(14) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

ancient smaragdine tablet(which explained the secret of the cosmos)

RELIGIOUS IMAGININGS (15)

The loss of symbolic connection to self or cosmos, Jung suggests in

transcendent which they provided, obliged the meaning task to invert

(l6) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

This dissociation of the individual personality we know by the ugly

The archetypal imaging power represents an aspect of our partici-

We live in a spiritually impoverished time, and Jung argues "that it

(l8) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

While a person who works in sincere dialogue with others, submits

RELIGIOUS IMAGININGS (19)

Western philosophy could be said to begin with the exclamation of the

god is not a concept, nor a presumed metaphysical construct; it is an

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

(20) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

a husk; the lightening is an experience. Day versus night, light versus

This is not a definition of the divine found in many breviaries or

This urgency to personify the cosmos is the primal religious need

(22) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of

This need to assimilate, to internalize, is the need we all have to render

(24) ARCHETYPAL IMAGINATION

Human experience does not always give rise immediately to ideas.