Dark Light of the Soul (eBook)

Dark Light of the Soul

“In an age focused increasingly upon a cultural, political, and social understanding of otherness as diversity, preferring to ponder God, if at all, mostly in terms of immanence, depth psychology is in danger of becoming breadth psychology. The search for transcendence has become more and more the province of New Age weekend workshops. On the other hand, depth psychology that seeks only the transpersonal without the incarnate spirit in the flesh of everyday relationships in history may likewise prove to be a failed enterprise…. In this work, I compare and contrast Boehme’s and Jung’s experiences with a special focus on the religious or psychological experience of what Erich Neumann calls unitary reality, a ground of being that contains all opposites in potentiality” (from the book)

Dark Light of the Soul explores the inner journeys of Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century Protestant mystic, and C.G. Jung, the twentieth-century depth psychologist. Each was concerned with the immediacy of experience, yet comprehended the importance of spirit as a transforming presence in human life. Kathryn Wood Madden connects the experiences of these two pioneers, focusing on a “ground of being that contains all opposites in potentiality.” She examines those experiences from the perspective of depth psychology and religion, offering meaningful insights for anyone on a path of inner development, as well as for professionals in clinical settings.

Dark Light of the Soul will be of interest to all therapeutic clinicians and anyone who wishes a deeper understanding of and fresh paths into the human psyche.

“Because so much tension exists in the world in the way each of us apprehends the divine, we sorely need a way of working with our psyches; this is imperative, in fact, to human existence and survival in the face of terrorism, fundamentalism, and archetypal evil. We need to locate and work within a psycho-spiritual umbrella that is large enough to house contradictions.” (from the book)

C H A P T E R S:

Preface

1. Unitary Reality
2. Distinctions between Psychology and Religion
3. Radical Otherness
4. Jung and the Pleroma
5. When Deep Calls unto Deep
6. The Self: Uniting Opposites
7. Meeting Clinical Otherness
8. Trauma, Dreams, and Resistance to Otherness
9. Soul Retrieval: The Lonely One
10. Through the Air Hole

References

About the Author

Kathryn Wood Madden, Ph.D., licensed psychoanalyst and Diplomate, AAPC, has served the past ten years at the Blanton-Peale Institute in New York City, first as Academic Dean and teaching faculty, and then as President & CEO. Kathryn received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary. She is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Psychology & Religion, (Springer 2009), senior editor of Quadrant: Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Religion & Health: Psychology, Spirituality & Medicine. Kathryn lectures regularly at national and international conferences on the subject of depth psychology and teaches courses on the Symbolic Nature of the Psyche and the Spiritual Dimensions of Clinical Practice. She maintains a clinical practice in New York City.