More insights from James Hollis Hauntings... Jung observed that everyone has a pathological secret, something so scary, so shameful perhaps, so humiliating, that one will protect it at nearly any cost. As long as such secrets remain buried, they will continue to percolate their invisible toxins into the world of conscious life. As a therapist I have born witness to the confession of many such stories, which is both privilege and burden. Yet the telling of such, in the presence of a witness, often occasions a lifting of that burden for the client. ...we need to reexamine, reappropriate, and appreciate anew the radical gift Jung provided us through the idea of the complex. Of all his insights, the complex is perhaps the most practical of his gifts. There is not a single therapeutic hour when I do not think about complexes, recognize their presence, and realize that we are always struggling with compelling spectral presences that have the power to usurp and manage this present hour, and to subvert all the possibilities of this moment into replicative history. Try telling a person in the grip of a complex, exhibiting rage, anxious obeisance, or avoidance, that he or she is in one and they will not only deny your assertion but most likely have a ready justification. In fact, one may safely say, in a pseudo-scientific theorem: wheresoever ready rationalizations exist, thereunto a complex is being protected. Thus we are all, much of the time, prisoners of history, haunted by the spectral “instructions” that float up from the past to inform color, dictate our choices in this new present. This moment is always new; it has never existed before, but we reflexively, repetitively bind our days, sometimes in moments of necessary continuity and sometimes in regressive obeisance to the past.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 17:07:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015