Quote of the Day

“What has always been basic to resurrection, or Easter, is crucifixion. If you want to resurrect, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that. They emphasize the calamity of the event. And if you emphasize calamity, then you look for someone to blame. That is why people have blamed the Jews for it. But it is not a calamity if it leads to new life. Through the Crucifixion we were unshelled, we were able to be born to resurrection. That is not a calamity. We must look freshly at this so that its symbolism can be sensed.”
—Joseph Campbell, from Thou Art That

Jungian Analyst Janis Maxwell

Northwest Arkansas’s Center for Psychology will host Maryland analyst Janis Maxwell for a 1-day seminar titled “Anaclitic Depression and the Archetype of the Mother” on Saturday, April 27, 2013. For more information, check out the Events page.

The Power of Myth

You can now listen to and download all six episodes of The Power of Myth, Bill Moyer’s classic PBS series with Joseph Campbell from 1988.

Should We Fulfill Our Potential?

I read a book review in the New Yorker last week and have been puzzling over it since. The review was written by Joan Acocella about the book Missing: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips. Acocella says:
“Adam Phillips, Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer, dislikes the modern notion that we should all be out there fulfilling our potential. In his new book, he argues that, instead of feeling that we should have a better life, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think that we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of night, we do think this, and grieve that it wasn’t possible. ‘And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives,’ Phillips writes. ‘Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live.’”

My first thought was to wonder what Carl Jung would say about that. (The article goes further to say that Phillips is a Freudian, so that explains that.) My second thought is that our unlived lives do become the story of our lives if we don’t deal with them in some way, and Jung tells us that this is really our life’s work. My third thought was that we should at the same time be living the lives we have in the most gratifying way as possible.