## Metadata - Author: [[James Hollis]] - Full Title: Living Between Worlds - Category: #books ## Highlights - The word neurosis arose in Scotland in the 1790s, amid the emergence of the machine age, when a physician named William Cullen speculated that our emotional disturbances derive from flaws or impediments in the neurological “machine” that we are. To understand that machine is to find how to fix the flaws. Later, other emerging metaphors replaced this image. In the late twentieth century, for example, American psychologist James Hillman saw the battle of the gods decided in favor of the great god “Economics.” More people’s lives, values, choices, and energies offered service to this demanding god than to any other value. As a treatment plan for the vast absences in our spiritual life, the modernist treatment plan is especially driven by the stepchild of the god Economics, named “Materialism.” When life gets difficult, go shopping. Until they were replaced by the ease of internet shopping, vast, brightly lit malls were temples drawing the faithful. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=313)) - Harari makes the compelling claim that Data is the new god, not only appearing in the machines that monitor us constantly but also “reading” our lifestyle choices, exercising sophisticated stratagems to manipulate our values and choices, exercising as much influence over our lives as the unconscious itself. ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=326)) - I have often suggested, with deliberate hyperbole, that the last time the Western world made sense to both king and commoner was around 1320. I choose that moment as the time of Dante’s Comedia, a dramatized portrait of a knowable, predictable Weltanschauung; an eternal structure of values; and a road map of consequences that reverberate through history. The twin outer representations of those longitudes and latitudes of the soul were the castle and the cathedral, both claiming divine sanction and earthly sovereignty. But implacable forces—such as the migration from cultivation of the earth toward urban environments; the Black Death, which rendered the authoritative powers impotent; the rise of a mercantile and increasingly educated middle class—eroded those powers and gradually shifted away from the fantasy that the real life is beyond this life toward “this worldly” values. Lost in this shuffle are the abiding questions of What happens to the human soul? and What now is available to help us find our way? ([Location 419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=419)) - ask yourself this question: What word or concept central to both psychology and psychiatry is almost wholly missing from modern treatment modalities? Ironically, it is psyche, which is the formative metaphor for these words, if not these practices. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=428)) - one gift of the psyche is psychopathology, which is when we are sufficiently split off from our souls that the psyche protests and summons us to accountability. Depth psychology recognizes that the presence of symptoms—the depression, the anxiety disorder, the self-medication—is a natural expression of the psyche, a commentary on how our life is going from the soul’s perspective. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=446)) - If we change only the behavior and ignore its charged locus in our unconscious, the early “story” will only migrate into a new venue, a different relationship, a recurrent dilemma. These emotionally charged “stories” or “complexes” are splinter personalities, fractal scripts, and somatic presences. ([Location 479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=479)) - The first half of life is preoccupied with adaptation, fitting in, learning roles and expectations. These often necessary compromises with the world around us seem to offer protection, acceptance by others, and anxiety management. But over the years, they also become imprisoning structures, reflexive responses, conditioned compliances. Accordingly, in the second half of life, we are challenged to recover our personal authority. Regaining personal, rather than acquired, authority is difficult and becomes a continuing life’s work, so powerful and repetitive are the received instructions and scripts. Personal authority requires sifting through the immense traffic that courses through our minds every moment. Which voices are those from my culture? Which from my family of origin? Which from my soul? And then we must mobilize courage to act upon what is true. ([Location 497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=497)) - My friend and colleague Marion Woodman used to ask people, before they began therapy with her, to agree to devote one full hour every day to writing in their journals, practicing active imagination, working with their dreams. Many people, she said, would respond, “But I don’t have that kind of time. I can’t cut that out of my schedule.” To which she replied, respectfully, “Then you’re not serious about this work. What could be more important than this kind of encounter with the magnitude of your own soul’s journey?” ([Location 511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=511)) - I’m not an advocate of so-called lucid dreaming, where people try to enter their dreams and change the endings. To my mind, that defeats the whole purpose of dreamwork. That is the ego reasserting its sovereignty rather than asking, Why has the psyche spoken to me in this way? What does it wish to tell me? What is it I need to learn here? Where do I need to be humbled in order to learn? I see the whole notion of lucid dreaming as contrary to soliciting the wisdom of our nature. It’s the ego seeking to control the soul one more time in one more subtle way. ([Location 559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=559)) - Personally, as far as formal learning goes, as opposed to maturational life experience, I have always considered a deep, disciplined experience in reading literature a better preparation for working with the psyche than the study of psychological theory and practice, especially as that theory and practice is taught in most modern psychology departments. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=602)) - Limiting the scope of one’s investigation to the observable is to suffer the delusion that what runs the world is observable. ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=605)) - Fiction does not mean “falsehood.” Coming from the Latin facere, it means “construct,” just as factories construct things, and fabric is something we make to wear. These constructions may point us toward the truth. ([Location 639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=639)) - After twenty-five years immersed in the humanities, I came to recognize the need to discern the source of these images that shape our culture, from whence this rich thesaurus of archetypes derives, and to what larger invisible drama they were in service. That preoccupation has occupied the second half of my life, and I know I could have discovered neither the power of depth psychology nor the tools to track the invisible energies without the preparation of the first half. ([Location 662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=662)) - In most instances, our symptoms tell us how and in what way we are driven by the anxiety experienced by our protective systems. ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=680)) - As one client said to me, quoting his Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group, “This isn’t working for me, but I do it very well.” ([Location 711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=711)) - All of our anxieties, the existential threats to our well-being, can be catalogued under the twin categories of overwhelmment and abandonment. We learn early that the world is big and we are not; we learn that we are powerless against so many forces “out there.” That message of fundamental overwhelmment is overlearned in all of us and sabotages the fact that we are brought into life with the guiding instincts and growing powers of resilience, as well as the adaptability that helps us take on those powers. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=741)) - My own mother was born into poverty and was classified in all her school documents as “indigent,” a word she did not understand. She never felt worthy of anything at all—nothing, all her life, nothing. Even as a child, I remember wanting to achieve something in order to make her feel better about herself. But by the time I had arrived, the message was too deeply imprinted, and no surrogate achievement by others could shake her core sense of unworthiness. ([Location 750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=750)) - So, in our forensic investigation of the “stuck places,” we have to ask ourselves: What anxiety will be generated here if I stop being stuck? Will I have to face something that feels overwhelming to me and step out into the world to take it on? Or will I have to walk the shaky plank of diminished self-esteem to show up as myself in this strange theatrical production I call my life? If, IF, we can answer the question of what we will have to face, we usually find that fear is chimerical—daunting to the child but quite manageable to the adult. If what we fear does come to pass, we will likely find that we are adults who can survive and prevail; the wave crashes over us but recedes and leaves us standing. ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=754)) - When we examine those fears, we find they usually are very primitive in their message: If I do this, feel this, express this, you will punish me, or I will lose your approval and affection, and I will perish. Yet, seldom, if ever, are those fears going to materialize. They are the simulacra of archaic anxieties of childhood, the ghostly hauntings of our defenseless past. If they were to materialize, would we not find our adulthood sufficient purchase on a ground firm enough to weather even that? Most of all, what is the cost of continuing stasis and stuckness when our being wishes to grow and develop? What betrayal of the soul transpires when we collude with our debilitating fears? And who, besides us, will pay those debts of unlived life—our children, our partners, our colleagues, our society? Do we not see that the best thing we can do for others is really to bring our best, most nearly authentic selves to engage them? ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=759)) - addictions are reflexive anxiety management systems. Each of those words is important. ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=771)) - Connecting with the “other” serves to lower the distress occasioned by our existential isolation, vulnerability, and dependencies. For many folks, the “other” is a substance: food, alcohol, purchasable material objects, a warm body. For still others, it is found through distractive “connections” with electronic devices, the internet, ideologies, compulsive exercise, prayer, mantras, and the like. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=785)) - None of what we are discussing here is new—the record of addiction is as old as the human story. We find a notable and compelling portrait of a modern neurotic person like us in Shakespeare. ([Location 797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=797)) - If someone said to you to liquidate your savings and invest them in that great new company Enron or in covered wagons that are surely going to stage a revival, you would think them daft. But we often invest our precious capital, our soul’s energy, in dead places every day and wonder why we do not feel that sense of satisfaction that ought to be there. ([Location 1006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1006)) - Nature does not waste energy. Sleep researchers have indicated that we average six dreams per night in a normal sleep cycle. ([Location 1014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1014)) - Over the past few decades, I have seen thousands of dreams, and I continue to marvel at their wisdom. Hour after hour, we wrestle with these spectral presences, these opaque visitors that we all encounter. I observe that over time, tending to our dreams generates a shift from reporting only to the demanding outer world and the default allegiance to the totalitarian complexes fate gave us toward a growing sense of wonder at this mysterious, symbolic source within each of us. ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1023)) - To reach the future, which is just as real as our past, we have to consent, or be driven, to be out of contact with the old for a very long time. No ocean is ever crossed without that willingness to risk, to leave behind the known shoreline long before the new land is found. As Jung expressed succinctly, “If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something.”2 ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1122)) - The anima embodies his relationship to his instincts, his feeling life, and his spiritual values—all of which he finds he cannot afford to embrace lest he prove vulnerable and lacking in competitiveness. ([Location 1666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1666)) - Jung’s term for the inner “masculine” of the woman is the “animus”—her sense of personal empowerment, legitimacy in a world of gender constrictions, permission, sense of capacity, and willingness to risk her full expression of herself in the world as it lies before her. ([Location 1677](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1677)) - As Jung noted, whatever we deny within ourselves will come to us sooner or later and demand payment. Then, we are forced to repair within, as the handless maiden did, and seek healing from our own nature and its restorative capacity. Given that so much psychotherapy today often supports and reinforces the ego’s demands or seeks our better adaptation to the mutilating world around us, we can see why it is so ineffective. ([Location 1689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1689)) - We know a child soon learns to “read” a tilted eyebrow, a raised tone of voice, what is spoken and not spoken; all children grow hypervigilant. While this tool of hypervigilance helps us perceive and adapt to our environment, with our eye focused only on “the outer,” it also separates us more and more from ourselves. ([Location 1722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1722)) - More than half the work of depth psychology is recovering an elemental trust in our deepest sources of knowing. ([Location 1726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1726)) - The etymology of the word religion (re-legare) means “to bind back to” or “to reconnect”; therefore, it is a confession of disconnection. Presumably, this reconnection is with God—or the “Ground of Being,” as Tillich called it. It might also be reconnection with our own natures or our souls. ([Location 1880](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1880)) - The “cure” we seek is not in resolution of a conflict but in transcendence of its debilitating opposites. ([Location 1908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1908)) - Ask yourself, Where do I have to grow into a psychology that holds those opposites and does not relapse into a regressive siding with one value or another? ([Location 1927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1927)) - It might be useful to think of an archetype as a verb and not a noun. If it were the latter, it would be an object and would show up in your MRI or CAT scan. Rather, as a verb, it is an organizing and compensatory energy. While your imagery might involve an automobile and your predecessor’s imagery might involve an ox cart or a chariot, the generative energy is the same. An archetype is not a kind of content but a formative system, a patterning, that helps bring to the raw chaos of nature meaning, sequence, purpose, and so on. While we might label such formative patterns as if they were nouns—ascent/descent, Mother, shadow, death/rebirth—they are experiences that cluster around a certain constellation of energies. When Joseph Campbell labeled his early work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he reminded us that the archetype of the hero/heroine is the personified energy that combats our twin enemies of fear and lethargy, both of which beset our lives at all times. ([Location 1972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1972)) - Part of what Jung saw in the records of the human psyche, East and West, past and present, was the archetype of the transcendent Other, sometimes named God or the gods. The faces of “God,” the creeds and practices surrounding any personal or tribal experience of the transcendent “Other,” will vary, will come and go; what is timeless is that large Other that we intuit as a species. For this reason, he considered religion neither an infantile regression, as Freud did, nor an opiate, as Marx did. He interpreted the data of historical record, the processes of his patients, and his own experience as an inherent desire for meaningful connection to that which is larger than we. ([Location 1980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1980)) - I saw a cartoon years ago in which a therapist said to the client, “I cannot solve your problem, but I can give you a more compelling story for your misery.” ([Location 1996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=1996)) - The antidote to loneliness is letting go of the fantasy that the attachment to the Other is necessary to our survival. (Certainly, the essence of pop music and media is that the Other is necessary for one’s survival, the loss of whom is catastrophic.) The antidote is to know that there is no antidote to be found, ultimately, and that that is okay. After all, most relationships fail because we ask too much of them. Is it not possible that more might survive if we asked less of them and more of ourselves? This is why Rilke defined a healthy relationship as a person being the guardian of the solitude of the Other. No matter how much we care or are cared for, we cannot live the other’s life or spare them difficulty, nor can they spare us. ([Location 2091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2091)) - dealing with our Shadow is the only way we can bring a bit more freedom to those around us—our children, partners, neighbors, fellow citizens. What I am unwilling to face in myself will always be carried by someone else. Perhaps we are only here to help each other get through life. Unburdening our partners, children, neighbors by lifting our stuff off of them is one way to start. ([Location 2141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2141)) - As Jung noted, “We have no schools for forty-year-olds. . . . Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them like that today?” ([Location 2151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2151)) - Our nature is forever changing and seeking growth; when outer forces or inner resistance oppose that growth, we experience a terrible deadening of the spirit. So many humans still suffer this diminution of spirit by the social constructs that limit them, or by fear-ridden “stories,” whose adaptive strategies take them further and further from their possible appointment with destiny. Just think of the constrictive role gender definitions and proscriptions play in damaging souls or of how so many people get estranged from their bodies and healthy sexuality. So much suffering has arisen for individuals out of the codification of group fears in normative “oughts” and “shoulds.” Wherever nature’s voice is constricted, the Shadow goes underground and works its way into the branching paths of pathology. ([Location 2180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2180)) - Ego consciousness, tasked with making it all work, labors to satisfy the Anxiety Party clamoring in the back benches of the inner Parliament for surcease, for return to the old order. The insurgent Soul Party agitates for growth, renewal, risk, and enlargement, and the Honorable Ego Prime Minister is beset with the impossible task of keeping these belligerents happy. No wonder this shaky government is overthrown each night by troubling dreams filled with brigands and guerillas stirring revolt in the provinces. No wonder so many resign this struggle for personal authority and consign their value choices to directive traditions, to external leaders, to others, thinking it easier to get along by going along. If only those internal brigands and guerillas would cooperate, it would all work out. But every night, in slumber’s sugar canebrakes, they agitate anew, and the insurrection within bubbles. And sooner or later, they march on the Capitol. ([Location 2236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2236)) - Jung’s reminder that sometimes one simply has to be “alone if [we are] to find out what it is that supports [us] when [we] no longer can support ourselves. Only this experience can give [us] an indestructible foundation.” ([Location 2259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2259)) - Jung challenges us to consider that within each of us is a center that is wiser than our knowledge, deeper than our learning, older than our chronology, and more durable than our calcified convictions. ([Location 2261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2261)) - I, too, realize how I have been guided all these years. We are all too close to it to see it in the hectic years; but later, when we see the long wave patterns forming like an ocean liner long past but whose passage we sense in the swells that rise up on our shores, we realize the presence of an invisible source that was there all along. Many will personify this presence as the unfolding will of God; others will point to our multiple socializing influences, which do play a role; others will ascribe it to our genetic codes; and still others, to random concatenations of molecules. Perhaps we might better simply call the archetypal combination of all these forces “the gods.” This is not a metaphysical or theological statement; it is a measure of respect for the autonomy of the mystery and the desire to stand somehow, in our limited human condition, in relationship to it. ([Location 2323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2323)) - When Jung said that neuroses were offended or neglected gods, he acknowledged the omnipotence of those invisible presences. The only question is this: Which metaphor best speaks to your sensibility? God, “the gods,” randomness, genetics, sociopolitical constructs, whatever? When you are drawn to one metaphor or another, please remember, the symbol is not the “Thing.” It simply reminds us to remember that the “Thing” is not the “Thing” and that the “Thing” is, and remains always, unknown. ([Location 2329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2329)) - Change is the nature of nature, and we are a part of nature. Change is how life renews; but ego consciousness seldom welcomes change because change undermines our fantasy of sovereignty, understanding, and control. The more we try to control, as those who suffer obsessive-compulsive disorders know intimately, the more life slips out of our control. ([Location 2336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089CJ2YZ1&location=2336))