wring a relationship out of a very frightened

forever. And we close all the relationships of

Through the bloodweb of our mothers, we start out connected to the pulse and rhythm of the cosmos. And then we are torn from the Mother, separated from the cosmos, separated from the gods, separated forever.

Similarly, the word Other is capitalized as a reminder of how huge, how cosmic, another person may become in our psychic mythology. For the child, the parent as Other is as infinite as the idea of God is to the adult.

We need to acknowledge that the character of all our relationships arises out of our first relationships, which we internalize and experience as an unconscious, phenomenological relationship to ourselves as well.

there is a single idea which permeates this essay it is that the quality of all of our relationships is a direct function of our relationship to ourselves.

If there is a single idea which permeates this essay it is that the quality of all of our relationships is a direct function of our relationship to ourselves. Since much of our relationship to ourselves operates at an unconscious level, most of the drama and dynamics of our relationships to others and to the transcendent is expressive of our own personal psychology.

The best thing we can do for our relationships

relationship to ourselves more conscious.

The best thing we can do for our relationships with others, and with the transcendent, then, is to render our relationship to ourselves more conscious.

This is not a narcissistic activity. In fact, it will prove to be the most loving thing we can do for the Other. The greatest gift to others is our own best selves. Thus, paradoxically, if we are to serve relationship well, we are obliged to affirm our individual journey.

In moving from the Tree of Life, or life instinctually connected, to the Tree of Knowledge, which is the birth of civilization, the race moves from the intimate familiarity of like with like to a strickened consciousness, which can only come from the subject-object split.

"Reading" the intentionality of the Self is the prime task of Jungian-oriented therapy and presumed to be the key to healing.

Consciousness is achieved only through the loss of the Other, and the perception that the Other is truly Other.

one of us in regressed states. Magical

Magical thinking is characterized by grandiosity and paranoia. Thus the child believes its thoughts may have made mother ill or out of sorts, or that personal illness has resulted from misbehavior rather than, say, a virus. The infantile thought process lacks the capacity for subject-object dichotomies. It projects its fear and ignorance onto the world, misreads the data, and so is driven to omnipotent conclusions.

As any therapist knows, the primary area in which growth is blocked, or relationship stuck, usually becomes clear in processing these parent-child encounters which are internalized as complexes.

Such complexes, especially the parental imagos, are effectively charged images that have a unique, historically generated and discrete energy. When activated, they have the power to usurp the ego position and totally alter one's sense of reality. The parental complexes are usually the most influential because they constitute the original experience of relationship, and remain its chief paradigm.

Again, because of the subjective misreading of these primal relationships, the power of the parental complexes to determine the character of subsequent relationships cannot be overstated.

Jung explains. What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents (and the ancestors too, for we are dealing here with the age-old psychological phenomenon of original sin) have not lived.

The internalized template of such relationships includes as its central text that one is powerless. So, for example, abused children may grow up to marry abusers and find it virtually impossible to leave. It is not that they are in love with the abuser, rather than the depth of the programmed powerlessness is greater than the hurt of abuse. Any social worker will testify that it usually takes several incidents before the victim will leave the abuser or get a restraining order. For the first few times, victims will rationalize the abuse. The rationalization protects them not from their abusers, but from the enormity of the primal parent-child template; thus, unwittingly, they conspire against themselves to remain not only with the abuser but with the powerlessness of childhood.

This projective identification is seen in what is called "The Stockholm Syndrome," named for a group of ordinary citizens in Sweden who were kidnapped and held for many days by urban guerrillas. When they were finally liberated, they were found not only to have helped their kidnappers, they had also adopted their political views. Patty Hearst, who aligned herself in the end with her captors, the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army, is another familiar example. These kidnap victims were adults, not children, but such was their sense of powerlessness that in order to survive they identified with the views of those who had the power. Such adaptation is Survival 101. If even adults adapt in this way, what else can we then expect of children?

The family of origin of many professional caregivers generates a high degree of self-identification in the child's fantasy that it is obliged to fix or heal the Other, in the hope that then the Other would be more responsive.

bay and preserve a fragile psychic integrity. While any of us may experience transient moods of wishing either

While any of us may experience transient moods of wishing either greater distance or closeness, these general patterns are often so deeply programmed by one's psychic history that they control the choice and character of all relationships. Then one is a prisoner of the past. And there are no prisons so confining as those of which we are unaware.

borderline personality, whose chief features include emotional lability,

provisional personality is inevitable since one is obliged to acquiesce

Consider the obvious, then, that we can hardly have a conscious, efficacious relationship with the Other when we have a deeply wounded relationship with ourselves. Consider, then, how difficult it is to have any relationship at all. All that I do not know about myself, all of my secret projects for healing myself of the wounds derived from my culture and family of origin, I am now imposing on you. All the complexes I have acquired in my life on this earth, you will have to suffer from me. How could I do that to you, while professing to love you? How can you do that to me, while professing to love me?

cherubic archer with wounding arrows of desire. By our decadent

situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate."19 But since the psyche consists of a multitude of split-off shards of energy,

since the psyche consists of a multitude of split-off shards of energy, complexes and archetypal forms (to which Jung granted near-mythological status with names like anima, animus, shadow), virtually all of which are unconscious, there is always ample opportunity for projection. As I can never know the unconscious, by definition or practice, so I can never know what energies may be acting autonomously and casting a veil of Maya, or illusion, over the world as I know

John Ciardi, "Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old"?

getting simply what the complex wants, what the unconscious history wants, what the unlived life wants. And then, given this unholy origin, the relationship can

We are reminded by ancient counsel that we should beware of getting what we want. Depth psychology echoes this: we could be getting simply what the complex wants, what the unconscious history wants, what the unlived life wants. And then, given this unholy origin, the relationship can

getting what we want. Depth psychology echoes this: we could be getting simply what the complex wants, what the unconscious history wants,

We are reminded by ancient counsel that we should beware of getting what we want. Depth psychology echoes this: we could be getting simply what the complex wants, what the unconscious history wants, what the unlived life wants. And then, given this unholy origin, the relationship can only play out the tragic script to which it is covertly bound.

ardor, that intense yearning for the Beloved, that frantic grappling,

sundering by the gods for our misdeeds, and the world thereafter

we may make them too important. Again, this is why one is bereft

"The general psychological reason for projection is always an activated unconscious that seeks expression."

has come home through the agency of the Other; they feel diabolical

As Mahatma Gandhi once remarked, "A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave." Projection, fusion, ''going home,'' is easy; loving another's otherness is heroic. If we really love the Other as Other, we have heroically taken on the responsibility for our own individuation, our own journey. This heroism may properly be called love. St. Augustine put it this way: "Love is wanting the other to be." This view of love expresses an oxymoronic truth, that true love is "disinterested." It not only allows the Other to be but supports their being as Other. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth defined God as "Wholly Other." Well, the Beloved too is Wholly Other.

projection's disappointments, the abandonment of the evanescent

the Other that tacitly acknowledges the diminution

Jungian analyst John Sanford summarizes Kunkel's paradigm of the capacity for growth: There are three basic experiences through which our egocentricity can be changed: through suffering, through the recognition of a power greater than our own will at work in our lives, and by coming to care for someone other than oneself.45

for example, opens the parent to a more capacious

Given the ubiquity of fear, the move to love is a considerable challenge. Only those who can face their fears, live with ambiguity and ambivalence, can find that personal empowerment which then makes possible love of the Other.

As noted earlier, usually by the time a couple arrives in therapy a lot of mutual wounding has occurred. The projections have worn away; the going home project has surfaced, with attendant disillusionment and anger; they are both bleeding from the thorns on the rose of love.

Four Principles of Relationship The principles that follow are all predicated on the thesis of this book, namely that one can achieve no higher or better relationship with the Other than one has achieved with oneself. 1. What we do not know about ourselves (the unconscious project), or will not face in ourselves (the shadow), will be projected onto the Other. 2. We project our childhood wounding (personal pathology), our infantile longing (the narcissistic going home agenda), and our individuation imperative onto the Other. 3. Since the Other cannot, and should not, bear responsibility for our wounds, our narcissism or our individuation, the projection gives way to resentment and the problem of power. 4. The only way to heal a faltering relationship is to render our going home project conscious and take personal responsibility for our individuation.

When our affective response is intense and our rationalizations plentiful, we can be sure that complexes are at work.

In the beginning we loved the otherness of the Other. Now it drives us up the wall. He, or she, must have changed! How easy to feel betrayed, to fall into resentment and the use of power. Jump ship? No, couldn't ever, just think of the kids. And so, through tactics of dependence or anger or control, mixed with emotional and sexual withdrawal, we try to force the Other back into our original, imaginary mold.

could define the shadow functionally as "that within myself with which I am uncomfortable."

We could define the shadow functionally as "that within myself with which I am uncomfortable."

Ego may also be steamrollered

Relinquishing the expectation of rescue by the Other is one of the most difficult projects of our lives. Thus, central to any long-term therapy is the progressive assumption of responsibility for oneself. Fred Hahn has eloquently, forcefully, spoken of this: The goal of therapy is to help the patient go beyond intellectualization and rationalization and other resistive maneuvers to the point where he can move into uncharted territories to seek and find the anguish and terror of total realization and discover that he can survive. To know that life can be truly absurd and capricious; that one is not omnipotent; that without magic as the ultimate defense, there is pain at times which hurts more than words can describe. And after the grief and the mourning, not only for the lost objects of one's fantasies, but for the fantasies and illusions themselves, to be able to live relatively without illusion. To know Time as a friend as well as an enemy. To recognize that happiness is not a condition, but an ephemeral and precious experience, that if one lives without illusion one must impart meaning to one's life; that hope must replace ex- Page 84 pectations and demands; that activity must replace passivity; that realistic hope must be directed towards the expansion and growth of one's potentialities, which implies experiencing more richly both sorrow and joy. That the gates to that Eden of infancy are closed, barred by angels with fiery swords. That mother is dead, forever, and ever, and ever.53 That about sums it up. The "mother" to whom Hahn refers in the last sentence is the mother complex, the charged energy within us which longs for security, succor and sanctuary.

solemnly mourn all those who have been destroyed

community forms when the members of a society have had a common transcendent experience, one that lifts each person out of his or her isolation to participate in the transformation.

A community forms when the members of a society have had a common transcendent experience, one that lifts each person out of his or her isolation to participate in the transformation. Should that plane go down, for instance, the crash survivors might very well experience community, given the large event which had proved a transcendent encounter.

We cannot readily define "soul," but we surely experience its presence or absence. Whether we will or no, we bring the needs of the soul to the work environment and suffer its neglect.

The love of their subject matter that brought them to teaching in the first place is being over- Page 104 burdened by political and administrative considerations. So the direct relationship between students and teachers has become eroded and lifeless, without eros. With eros, learning is infectious. Without eros, students feel despised and cease to care about the subject itself, motivated only by marks.

individual in corporate life transfers the stratagems

Just as Jung observed that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unconscious life of the parent, so it might be said that the secret psychic burden of any institution will be an expression of where its leadership is blocked on a personal level.

makeshift that does its utmost to prevent numinous

practice of psychotherapy is a mere makeshift

Jung once observed that life "is a short episode between two great mysteries."

Thus Freud concurs with Voltaire's assertion that if God did not exist, we would have to invent him. But what kind of God? Here Freud avers that our infantile experience of the personal parent is transferred onto the cosmos.

wish on the autonomous cosmos in order to assuage

What we say about God is finally saying more about ourselves than the mystery we call God.

But in the shock, denial and dismay of this past week, similar to what many of us experienced at the assassination of John F. Kennedy, something even more primal is afoot, something that pulls on our deepest assumptions about the cosmos. Why someone like a Diana would become such a cynosure of public scrutiny and curiosity in the first place, to the point of paparazzi seeking to satiate our private hungers, is the deeper question. And it is a question about us. That we do not, as a civilization, ask such a question is what helped harry and devour her.

In the enormity of the projections onto a figure like Diana, or other culture icons like Elvis, we see much of our own dynamics. As Karl Jaspers and Paul Tillich asked, we are obliged to "read" the artifacts of our culture in order to discern the movement of soul beneath.69 In the dismay following her death, we observe not only the natural shock of unexpected trauma, but a profound disbelief, as if thousands of others were not dying at the same moment in twisted wreckages of one sort or another.

husk which the Mystery once animated. To worship

If the central task of the first half of life is to build a solid ego identity, to leave Mom and Dad, go into the world of work and re- 84 "The Age of Anxiety," in Collected Poems, p. 407. 85Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, par. 551. 86Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 140. Page 131 lationship and create a life, then what is the task of the second half of life? What, indeed, is our proper vocation? If the first half of life is about responding to what the world asks of us, then the task for the second half is, what does the soul ask?

What is the unlived life that haunts us, summons us, judges us? We all know, and yet daily deflect the question. We wait as if someone else knows the answer and will offer it to us. No one else knows what is right for usnot cleric, not parent, not partner, not therapistbut something in us certainly knows, and through our symptomatology expresses its dismay at our disregard.

Where are we stuck in our developmental process? What fears intimidate us? Are they

not the relics of childhood, the recollection of wounding, of feeling abandoned or overwhelmed? Does not our tacit collusion with those fears keep us walled up in the behaviors of childhood?

And recall the sign above the desk of the Administrator of the Jung Foundation of Ontario: "The inner marriage is all very well, but it doesn't warm my feet at night."

As great as the gift of caring and compassion may be, the ultimate gift to any relationship is the willingness to dialogue with the Other, which, in turn, can lead to individual enlargement. Dialogue with the Other, however unpleasant or painful, is the

catalyst for individuation.

that You also becomes a Thou. Recall the two admonitions