Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2007, 52, 369–379

Book reviews

Edited by Linda Carter and Marcus West

Costello, Melanie Starr. Imagination, Illness and Injury: Jungian Psychology and
the Somatic Dimensions of Perception. London & New York: Routledge, 2006.
Pp. 122. Hbk. £50.00/$90.00; Pbk. £16.99/$30.95.

This book investigates the relationship between body and psyche in ‘the synthesis and
contextualization of experience’. It explores the function of the soma as a repository
for aspects of experience withheld from consciousness in a condition referred to by
the author as ‘knowing-and-not-knowing’. This, she describes as ‘a borderland of
consciousness where experience is registered in some form, but only diffusely thought,
if thought at all’. Certain states of anxiety, along with other neurotic and somatic
symptoms are portrayed as expressions of knowledge that have not been adequately
represented to consciousness. In this respect these ‘knowing-and-not-knowing’ states
resonate with what Christopher Bollas (1987) calls the ‘unthought known’ whereby
patients express, through the transference, aspects of their early object relations that
have not been mentally represented. Costello translates these unrepressed contents of
the unconscious into a Jungian language and calls them ‘somatically expressed complex-
fragments’. She extends Bollas’s argument and ascribes these unconscious contents not
solely to early object relations but also to an ‘interplay of archetypal, cultural, and later
developmental factors’.
The author accepts, as Kalsched (1996) described with traumatized patients, that
somatization can be understood as a defensive mechanism in that it protects the
individual from experiencing unbearable psychic pain through the inhibition of mental
representation. However, she argues that somatization plays an important part in the
resolution of psychic conflict in her observations that injury and illness often precede
‘the emergence of insight or the resolution of perceptual distortions’. She illustrates
this with both clinical examples and an interesting biographical case study of Albert
Speer in his relationship with Hitler. Speer is portrayed as being blinded by both
archetypal and personal factors in his love and admiration of Hitler and that it was
only a hospitalization for severe illness and a near-death experience that allowed him
to see Hitler for who he really was. In this light, Costello sees Speer’s illness as an
attempt to integrate formerly repressed perceptions and affect, rather than a defensive
disassociation from feelings too difficult to bear.
Central to her argument is the idea that what she calls the ‘shadow of the will’ distorts
the synthesis of selected fragments of experience. ‘The shadow of the will’ sounds to me
like the psychoanalytic concept of repression, but she attempts to distinguish it from
this by stating that repression entails the exclusion of something from consciousness
that was once perceived, whereas the action of ‘the shadow of the will’ results in
‘disruption in perception itself’. She goes on to attribute this disruption to two factors:

0021–8774/2007/5203/369 
C 2007, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
370 Book reviews

the influence of archetypes which, as well as fostering the symbolization of experience,

can also constrict the individual’s identity, and the effects of ‘complex fragments’ from
the personal unconscious which have never been conscious. The author claims that
‘Affect that is not represented cannot be repressed, but can gain expression through
the body-self, as in infancy. The body provides the bridge for transformation of affect
fragments into an integral complex’.
The book attempts to introduce a progressive, as opposed to regressive, Jungian take
on the function of psychosomatic phenomena. Instead of emphasizing the defensive
aspects of psychosomatic illness and injury, she portrays these phenomena as actions of
the Self which use the body as a means of bypassing resistance to knowing. Therefore
somatization is seen as transformative in resolving conflict. In one case example, she
describes how a knee injury of a patient on a ski holiday not only helped disrupt
his compulsive heroic behaviour but also led to new insights in the resolution of a
long standing conflict. Costello explains how she saw the patient’s perceptual field as
restricted by an identification with a hero complex of ‘overaggressive idealism’ which
was juxtaposed against inferiority feelings from his childhood. The injured knee acted
as a symbol of the transcendent function in the analysis. Through dream analysis, she
illustrates how the image of the wounded knee offered a third option in the resolution
of a conflict between the complexes of the hero and wounded child. She proposes
that analysis can foster the coalescence of undigested experiences, held somatically as
unrepressed complex fragments, into coherent conscious ‘feeling-toned complexes’. In
contrast to Mara Sidoli (2000), who sees regression to psychosomatism in analysis as
a resistance to symbolisation and integration, Costello considers this type of regression
to be in the service of symbolization by shoring up deficiencies in the symbolic system
itself.
Costello, a Jungian analyst based in Washington DC, employs analytic technique
which is closer to the Zurich than the London school. This includes, for example,
imaginal dialogue with the inflamed muscles of one of her patients and the encourage-
ment of another to paint. In Chapter 8 she illustrates, using nine prints of her patient’s
colourful paintings, how her patient attempted to repair deficiencies in the maternal
imago through body representations in painting. The picture series, which may also
be of interest to art therapists, she sees as portraying ‘the intimate connection between
the body field of knowing, the child archetype, and childhood modes of perception’.
Costello’s use of language and terminology in the book is very classically Jungian
with emphasis on archetypes and complexes. This, together with her different analytic
methods, left me feeling distanced from the book.
However, I think that her main hypothesis, namely, that psychosomatic phenomena
can be understood as synthetic, transformative actions of the Self and not merely
defensive regressive strategies, is valuable. I found the chapter on Speer fascinating,
although I was confused by her comment that Speer’s ‘near-death experience defies
psychological interpretation, which can only serve to deconstruct a phenomenon that
is best left a mystery’. This annoyed me, not only because I saw it as an experience
worth trying to interpret, but also because, at the end of the chapter, she attempts
just this when she says that the near-death experience ‘in the final analysis, signifies a
second birth’. The book is interesting and does, as the author hopes, contribute to ‘our
growing apperception of psyche-soma unity’.

References
Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Book reviews 371

Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal
Spirit. London: Routledge.
Sidoli, M. (2000). When the Body Speaks: The Archetypes in the Body. London:
Routledge.

Martin Schmidt
Society of Analytical Psychology

Kradin, Richard. The Herald Dream: An Approach to the Initial Dream in

Psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books, 2006. Pp. 158. Pbk. £14.99.

In this book Richard Kradin, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, draws
from his experience in teaching dream interpretation at the Center for Psychoanalytical
Studies at the Massachusetts General Hospital and offers us a practical guide for
dream interpretation. In a didactic manner, Kradin describes what he does with dreams,
how he teaches students to receive and handle dreams in treatment, and the way he
works with dreams in supervision groups. Most specifically, the central concept of
Kradin’s thesis extends from the word herald which means to announce or to foretell;
he uses this concept to further elaborate Jung’s fundamental ideas about the initial
dream.
It must be remembered Jung (1947) emphasized the diagnostic and prognostic
importance of the initial dream in bringing forward the essential etiological factors of
the dreamer’s inner situation. This beginning material offers insight into the origins of
psychic structure and, along with anticipating the prognosis, it may hint at therapeutic
management of the main treatment issues. Building on Jung’s examination of initial
dreams, Kradin tries to define the ‘initial conditions’ of the psyche and to predict the
‘trajectory of the treatment’.
The first half of the book is devoted to explication and comparison of psychoanalytic
and Jungian views of the unconscious and dream work in conjunction with contempo-
rary neuropsychological and cognitive research findings. The second half is devoted to
the analysis of the herald dreams of 8 patients, 5 men and 3 women.
Chapter two, ‘Dreams in Theory’, deals with sleep and dreams, consciousness in
dreams, dreams and time, and dreams and the unconscious. Of interest in this chapter
is Kradin’s ability to develop a kind of dialogue between psychoanalytic models of
psyche (Jung and Freud) and systems of understanding from comparative religion and
Buddhist psychology, for instance comparing Freud’s idea of psychological achievement
with the Buddhist notion of therapeutic solution.
Chapter three, ‘Dreams in Practice’, discusses interpretation, who the interpreter is,
and resistance to interpretation. Kradin notes the importance of an introduction to
analytic dream process as a way to prepare the patient for the benefits of this kind of
work.
Chapter four, ‘Approaching the Dream’, presents a systematic approach to dream
interpretation. Jung’s (1945) description of the four phases which make up the
dramatic structure of the dream: exposition (location, time and cast), peripetia (plot
development), crisis (point of maximal tension) and lysis (resolution) are melded with
the five W’s of reporting a journalistic narrative: Where (dreamscape), Who (cast of
characters), When (time of dream action), What (narrative: exposition, crisis, lysis),
Why (why this dream at this time).
In the following chapters Kradin analyses specific herald dreams which he says are
critical in clinical practice with patients. All of the dreams are worked in the systematic
372 Book reviews

way of gathering associations, and then interpreting the Where, Who, When, What,
Why and the Crisis and Lysis of the dreams.
Although Kradin is familiar with dream work approaches which emphasize the im-
portance of preserving the imagistic quality of the dream without semantic translation
and of engaging the affect embedded in the image directly, made possible by suppressing
semantic networks, his goal is the interpretation of the dream, as he thinks that ‘the
ego insists that the dream come to it and this can only be achieved by its interpretation’
(p. 5). Kradin says that:
In practice, when an analyst listens to the description of a dream, he or she transforms
the narrative description into a new set of images based on his/her own personal
imaginings. The evoked images are translated into narrative language in an effort to
confer meaning relevant to the dreamer’s current psychological situation.
(p. 45)

In my view (Gallbach 2006), dream work can be significantly enriched by approaches

which allow the dreamer to remain within the context of the dream experience itself,
interacting with its dramatic narrative, its images, symbolic language and its somatic
presence. The analyst can assist the dreamer in the direct experience and systematic
interaction with the dream, thus promoting an opportunity for the meaning of the
dream to be revealed in the dreamer him/herself, besides being conferred by the analyst
through interpretation.
In his analysis of the herald dreams of his patients, Kradin focuses on a meeting place
which he calls the individuation zone where personal, developmental experiences come
together with archetypal, spiritual ones. This plays out in the analytic process through
discussion of mythological amplifications which approximate archetypal underpinnings
in addition to the transference and countertransference significance of the dreams. The
various individual cases are presented in detail with rich psychodynamic diagnostic and
prognostic considerations.
This book is successful in demonstrating the importance and benefits of dream work
in the analytical process and how dream interpretation can be brought into relation with
the other transactions of the treatment. It is an important contribution to dream work
and symbolic constructive psychotherapy, resisting the modern trend of using mainly
psycho-pharmacological interventions and short-term cognitive therapy in psychiatric
treatment.
Besides providing a good introduction to dream interpretation, the book also
brings, in a didactic way, clarity to Jung’s main concepts and thoughts about dream
analysis and integrates them with Freudian and neo-Freudian analytic perspectives,
thereby enabling their dialogue with contemporary neuropsychological and cognitive
concepts.

References
Gallbach, M.R. (2006). Learning from Dreams. Einsideln: Daimon.
Jung, C.G.(1945). ‘On the nature of dreams’. CW 8.
Jung, C.G.(1947). ‘The practical use of dream-analysis’. CW 16.

Marion Rauscher Gallbach

Sociedade Brasileira de Psicologia Analı́tica
Book reviews 373

Haynes, Jane. Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? The Journal of a Psychotherapist.
GB: intheconsultingroom.com, 2007. Pp. 227. Pbk. £11.99.

Analysis is something that is generally conducted in intense and rigorous privacy, a

state broken, on the analyst’s part, only by the needs of professional consultation and
supervision, and by the less common—but still insistent—demand that the profession
makes to have the work written about in a way that furthers our understanding of our
difficult endeavour. Typically, when analysts write, they do so about their analysis of
others; when patients write, they do so about their own (Morley 2007). It is a very rare
thing to come across an analyst writing about their own analysis and its impact over
time, together with accounts of their work with patients, and with patients’ accounts
of their experience of the work. In this sense, Jane Haynes’ book is a radical departure
from the norm.
It is also self-published and available over the internet as an e-book, a mode
of transmission that potentially can make writing more accessible than relying on
established publishers’ and distribution networks. What self-publishing may lack are
the services of well-informed and expert editors who can act as a critical sounding
board to the project, encouraging some aspects of the text and playing down
others.
Haynes’ book is a determined leap into a debate about how much should be talked
about by analysts of their own history and about their work, and it takes a clear position
that rigorous ‘analytic’ silence can and should be broken from time to time—particularly
in print when accompanied by the voice of the patient. This is both an experiential
position and a theoretical one on Haynes’ part. It makes her book simultaneously
valuable, as an account of what it means to be an analyst—the multitude of feelings,
thoughts, bodily states, reactions and so on that happen in the presence of, and as the
result of, our interactions with our patients—and very disturbing, as a deliberate act of
transgression of ‘traditional’ analytic boundaries.
It is also a terribly sad, painful, and resolute book. Its title comes from Lear, and it
is filled with stories about fathers, including Haynes’ own father who died when she
was seven from the neurological effects of terminal syphilis, having been emotionally
and behaviourally erratic for some years previously. It also includes the death of her
son-in-law, whose murder leaves her grandchildren fatherless, and the death of a patient
who leaves his own children fatherless. The primary thrust of the book, however, is
the impact on her of her analysis, and of her male analyst who himself died suddenly
before their work together was finished. The book is written under the shadow of that
loss (which reverberates with other losses) and is clearly an attempt to work out the
meaning of her experience with him—and, of course, without him.
The book is divided into two parts: ‘Your Consulting Room’ and ‘My Consulting
Room’. The first is about her life as revealed in her analysis. The course of her 13-year
analysis is described in some detail, with a great deal of emotional colouration and
self-revelation, and it is followed by two letters to her analyst after his death that track
the impact on her of her experience with him. What feels disturbing to me is the need
Haynes seems to have to stimulate the readers’ desire to know who he was. In itself, this
would be inevitable to some degree—we want to be able to put faces to words, to join
in, in a vicarious way, with the tale that is being told; this must be part of the attraction
of being an analyst. However, I think Haynes pushes this vicarious engagement into a
more voyeuristic position by dropping clues and then by finally using his first name.
We are no longer allowed to imagine and wonder; we are made to know. This feels
very discordant and gives the curious impression that Haynes felt herself to be the only
person in analysis with her analyst. Analytic tact suggests not revealing too much, not
374 Book reviews

because of the perils of self-exposure (the analytic process is one long self-exposure,
after all), but because of its impact on other people, particularly its impact on other
patients. By ‘other patients’ I realize I mean not just Haynes’ own patients, but also her
analyst’s other patients. As an analysand she does not, it is true, have any responsibility
to them; as an analysand who became an analyst, though, perhaps she does. This
then links to the second part of the book—experiences from her own consulting
room.
Haynes trained at the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) and was a member for
many years before leaving it a few years ago. Her book makes no direct mention of
the SAP by name, though she describes elements of her training experience with her
supervisors, the work of the C.G. Jung Clinic, and the work with a training patient.
She describes a contrast between a more rigid approach to clinical practice—identified
in some ways with her training organization, but also with a general psychoanalytic
orthodoxy—and a more flexible, but still measured, responsiveness to her patients.
On the book jacket she identifies herself as ‘a relational psychotherapist’ and in it she
gives a clear account of the truth of this, and argues a case for the relational position.
She describes relatively short-term work (2-4 years) and she obviously has a talent for
engaging with people whose lives have been very damaging to them. She tells us a lot
about them, and about herself, as she describes her practice and the people she has
worked with.
It is not that Haynes is not thoughtful about these questions of revelation and
exposure—in this second part of the book she discusses well and sensitively the
difficulties of seeking informed consent and of the possible impact on her ex-patients
of her decision to write about them. The book includes two perspectives on a short
analysis—one by her and one by her patient. They make fascinating reading and can
give us a kind of experience of being in the work together with them. It also includes
the transcript of a meeting between Haynes and an ex-patient, ‘Miss Suicide’, two years
after their therapy had finished, discussing the time in the therapy when Miss Suicide
had tried to kill herself.
I am left wondering, however, why the book feels disturbing. I do not think that it
is simply because I am not a relational psychotherapist, so feel my analytic orthodoxy
is being challenged—though there must be some of that; I think, on reflection, that it is
because this kind of book is more usually written by people who are no longer practising,
which allows them space to reflect on their personal and analytic selves, showing the end
of a conversation. With Haynes’ book, I am conscious that the material she gives is now
available not only to past and present patients, but also to future ones, who may read it
and so enter therapy with not only their own burdens but also those of their therapist.
It makes me feel the tragedy of the losses in Haynes’ life—the absence or taking-away
of the very people who should have been there to hear her fully, and so relieve her of
the search for her interlocutor. Her analyst’s death, in particular, reverberates through
the book, and reminds us all of the responsibilities we have and the arbitrariness of
what life gives us. In short, this is a vivid picture of the internal and external life of an
analyst, for better and for worse.

Reference
Morley, R. (2007). The Analysand’s Tale. London: Karnac Books.

David Hewison
Society of Analytical Psychology
Book reviews 375

Barcellos, Gustavo. Vôos & Raı́zes: Ensaios Sobre Psicologia Arquetı́pica,

Imaginação e Arte [Flights & Roots: Essays on Archetypal Psychology, Imagination
and Art], São Paulo: Ágora, 2006. Pp. 248. Pbk. R$ 43.90.

Gustavo Barcellos is a prominent Brazilian Jungian psychotherapist and analyst and

an ardent admirer of the United States practitioner James Hillman, one of the great
figures of archetypal psychology—to whom Barcellos renders homage throughout this
collection of a dozen recent conference papers and essays. For the author the common
thread is a notion of the soul: for the reader the main interest will lie in the author’s
exploration of culture, especially of his home country Brazil.
In a brief preface Barcellos explains that his essays are a sideline to more than twenty
years of clinical work with patients—the writing is ‘an activity of the left hand’. He
grants that the main, or sole, merit is his interest in the South of his country—the best
metaphor he asserts for the Latin-American character of Brazil. The essays are thereby
‘niche writing’, not innovation in the mainstream of the discipline.
Since Barcellos writes in Portuguese he is accessible largely to those who may already
have some knowledge of the context. An opening essay exalting bossa nova makes
rather more of this musical form than is warranted. Some material on broader culture
is of secondary value. In a discussion on Jung’s own essays on literature, poetry and
psychology, Barcellos canters through such familiar sources as Maurice Bowra, T.S.
Eliot, Herbert Read and Virginia Woolf—with a leavening of references to Hillman
and to Anthony Storr.
The pace and interest quicken in papers looking at specifically Brazilian experience.
He has a provocative attempt at defining feminism through the paradoxical life of a
legendary drag queen and criminal (reminiscent of France’s Jean Genet), João Francisco
dos Santos, known as Madame Satã (Satan)—from a 1930s film of Cecil B. De Mille.
Dos Santos was born in 1900 in a family of 17 children and was in his time a transvestite,
homosexual, murderer, and star of carnival, spending much of his life in prison and
dying in 1976. But he also married and brought up six or seven adopted children.
Barcellos treats Madame Satan as ‘the portrait of the feminine in Brazil’—not perhaps
the most obvious candidate for the purpose. Since Barcellos presented his paper at a
conference in November 2000, a film based on the early life of Madame Satan has been
released by the Brazilian film maker Karim Ainouz.
Barcellos devotes an essay to Saint Gonçalo who has a cult following in the Brazilian
countryside. Gonçalo is really an obscure 12th century Portuguese Dominican, prone to
song and dance, and the patron saint of Almarante in Portugal where he was credited
with miraculous healing powers. He was also credited with facilitating marriage in
difficult cases—for fallen women, the elderly and the widowed. The cult of this
useful saint was taken by Portuguese colonists to Brazil, along with the associated
song and dance. It was soon banned by the church in the towns but took hold
in the rural areas where parochial controls were less strong. In Brazil the saint is
portrayed with a viola in his hands, which was not the case in Portugal, and this
with the dance evokes comparisons with Dionysus and with Orpheus and his lyre.
Barcellos notes that ‘originally’ Saint Gonçalo plays the viola to lead prostitutes out
of the infernal circle of wickedness on to the good path of Christian spirituality.
In the Barcellos account, Gonçalo in Brazil is the patron saint of viola players and
tarts.

Michael Wolfers
Writer, translator, London
376 Book reviews

A Retrospective Review

Beebe, John (Ed.), Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy: Perspectives from
Analytical Psychology. Papers from the 2002 North American Conference of Jungian
Analysts and Candidates. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 2003. Pbk.
$26.00.

Making sense of the terror in our world

This is a terrible book. It is terrible the way that all good books about the human passion
for terror are terrible. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, William Shirer’s The Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich, and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism are
examples of such books. This book certainly belongs to their kind, yet offers a much-
needed psychological perspective: it reveals the inner world as the ultimate battlefield
where we must confront and fight terror, violence, and destruction.
The thirteen essays that John Beebe has compiled share a commitment to confront the
dark side of the soul. Altogether—and they do hold together in a compelling manner—
the essays hammer us with a stark truth: the human condition strangely feeds upon
terror, violence, and destruction. In the book’s opening essay, ‘Explaining Evil’, Clarissa
Pinkola Estés puts it this way: ‘Evil is hungry’. Every essay from this one forward
paints a different picture of this hungry ghost. Each asks, ‘What are the unconscious
roots of its need to terrify and destroy? What should be our conscious response to its
destructiveness?’
Pinkola Estés tells moving stories of her childhood encounters with battered people
and her psychological work with survivors of the Columbine High School tragedy.
‘People’, she writes, ‘are most especially defenseless after a wounding—when and if they
remain untended to. If they remain unhealed, some significant portion of the psyche
often calcifies into a defensive bitterness that can take the form of detached cruelty to
self and others’. A group with these dynamics becomes corrupt and acts like an ‘out
of control golem’, projecting its own subhuman, animal-like qualities onto others and
perceiving them as soulless, a stain to be rubbed out. This easily justifies war. To resist
such evil, Pinkola Estés advocates self-examination, integrity, and remembering our
humanity.
Jacqueline Gerson takes an in-depth look at a form of terror now epidemic in her
local Mexico City—kidnapping—and notes that kidnappers reenact historical traumas
in the Mexican psyche, including the kidnapping of Mexico herself by Cortés and his
successors. Her essay is a cry for consciousness, appealing to her fellow Mexicans to
change their collective complex of passive victimization.
Judith Hecker, a Jewish scholar of Arabic and Islamic civilization, empathically offers
‘A View from the Islamic Side’. Her essay features the famous 11th century Persian sage
al-Ghazali, whose sophisticated grasp of the dynamics of terror and violence brings
into high relief the complexity of Islamic thought, and shows us the degree to which
the Arab psyche has served as an ethnic-cultural projection screen for the rationalistic
Westerner’s more primitive, emotional side.
John Dourley’s essay probes the archetypal, instinctual roots of group hatred. When
animosity between nations or groups is used to promote social cohesion—a survival
mechanism—societies devolve in their level of moral responsibility. ‘Demonization
becomes the first step to dehumanization and finally to elimination’. As Beverley
Zabriskie writes in response, ‘an individual or collective system that is unable to tolerate
Book reviews 377

the suffering of incompleteness is going to overfill itself with a divine right, which both
drains its humanity and would take away the humanity of others’. Dourley encourages
us to develop a healthy sense of doubt around the possession of absolute truth and an
understanding of how all civilizations share a common well of wisdom.
Mary Dougherty’s essay reveals terror in women’s lives: domestic violence, oppression
by paternalistic cultural authorities, and active religious persecution. Relating two
clinical cases, she shows how terror has a kind of radioactive half-life, persistently
replicating the original trauma. Only persistent, gentle analysis of the erroneous
assumptions of their complexes led to transformation of her patients’ lives.
In papers written before publishing their own illuminating book, The Cultural
Complex, Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles share their fertile thoughts on group
complexes, a concept anticipated by Jung in his misunderstood writings on Nazi
Germany but developed by these writers into a politically sophisticated ‘inner
sociology’. Like personal complexes, cultural complexes take on a life of their own
and can seize an entire society, nation, or group with destructive value judgments
and attitudes, giving rise to episodes of mass hysteria, persecution, and war. Singer’s
essay notes that radical Muslim terrorism is a demonic, archetypal defence designed to
protect and relieve a collective spirit wounded by the loss of its scientific, technological
and materialistic initiative to the West. Recognizing that it will take more than this
to address and actually heal the humiliation of the Muslim world, Singer reminds
us of Jung’s statement that ‘if we are to develop further we have to draw to us and
drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a
distance’.
Samuel Kimbles’ essay observes ‘collective shadow processes’ in history, explaining
how an ‘initial traumatic cultural complex is preserved across generations by an
unconscious-to-unconscious communication dynamic that continues to structure both
collective and personal events’. Descendants of Nazi perpetrators, Palestinian and
Israeli youths, and American blacks seeking reparation for slavery, are examples
of people suffering from traumas generationally removed but kept alive as cultural
complexes.
Sherry Salman takes on the dynamics of ethnic cleansing in her searing exploration of
‘Blood Payments’. Using mythology as well as case studies, she asserts the provocative
idea that ‘Drinking the dregs of fury’s rage, our own and that of others, is part of
the psyche’s move toward wholeness’. Terror leads to transformation. The memory
of trauma initiates the psyche into a new order of existence that includes the dark
underworld but also compassion and communion with all suffering people. Salman’s
recipe for enabling such healing is tolerance of our rage, as opposed to repressing or
acting it out.
In a lovely essay on Benjamin Britten, Arthur Colman illustrates what Salman and
others in this book mean by such tolerance of the shadow leading to compassion. It
was while facing the horror of war yet consciously holding his own position of pacifism
that Britten produced his beautiful War Requiem. Music gave the composer a container
to hold these together. Colman explores how music has a moral and healing side.
Arlene Te Paske Landau’s penetrating essay on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure
offers the contrary example of a work of art that shows the tragedy of trauma
without rebirth or healing. Jude the Obscure, replete with dysfunctional family life,
alcoholism, and failed love, is a story of stunted individuation. Te Paske Landau
connects Hardy’s harrowing tale to contemporary society, in which the ‘annulment
of the human personality’ is driven by terror and produces an alienation from our
spiritual side. The story of multigenerational trauma ‘sounds the irrepressible note of
sadness in an age as impoverished as ours’.
378 Book reviews

In ‘Wrestling with God: From the Book of Job to the Poets of the Shoah’, Naomi Ruth
Lowinsky, a child of Holocaust survivors, describes a childhood ‘stalked by terror, as by
a big cat’. Through imagined discussions with the ghost of her grandmother who died
in a camp, amplified by passages from the Book of Job, Jung’s Answer to Job, and poets
of the Shoah, she poignantly fleshes out her main theme—wrestling with God. Perhaps
the deepest terror of all is to try to humanly understand the heart and mind of a God
who allows such horrors as the Holocaust. Lowinsky models for us ‘the cultivation of
a religious attitude in the shadow of Terror’. She describes the life of survivor and poet
Paul Celan, who tried but could not develop such an attitude. Unable to contain his
terror in a larger spiritual framework that held together the opposites of good and evil,
his despair finally led him to suicide. He could not ‘wrestle with God’ and tolerate His
darkness.
Brian Skea’s concluding essay, ‘Jung, Spielrein, and Nash: Three Beautiful Minds
Confronting the Impulse to Love or to Destroy in the Creative Process’, probes the
experiences of Jung, Sabina Spielrein, and mathematician John Nash (upon whose life
the film A Beautiful Mind is based). Regrettably, Skea portrays Jung rather one-sidedly
as narcissistic, giving the impression that his genius may have been merely a response
to disturbing factors in his personal development. But he also shows how the terrifying
powers of the mind wound, deflate, and fragment the ego, and then rejuvenate it with
new possibilities. He explains how therapeutic measures coupled with strong acts of
will can move a ‘beautiful mind’ from a condition of breakdown to reintegration at a
higher level. Skea presents a comprehensive model of the Self which genuinely advances
the way we think and speak about it.
This book is full of heart, rich with beautiful anecdotes, case illustrations, and
moments when human frailty is met with human resilience. Its strongest feature is
its psychological acuity, and its most nourishing virtue is its spiritual depth. It clearly
locates terror, violence, and the impulse to destroy within the religious dimension. It
suggests that there is something in the soul that hungers for terror, even needs it for
its own transformation. Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism acknowledge this when
they show their very foundations to be rooted in some experience of terror, be this
the confrontation with a wrathful God, the crucifixion, or the shocking discovery that
people outside the palace age, get sick, suffer, and die. Similarly, the Arthurian knight
is driven into the mouth of the cave in which dwells the dragon he must slay, knowing
that this terrifying beast will at best singe him and at worst incinerate him.
If this terror of individuation is not made conscious, it will be experienced, as Jung
implied, as a fate that comes upon us in the guise of some other form of terror. Jung
also once said that neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering, meaning that an
unconscious acting-out of suffering occurs when one is unconscious of the true reason
to suffer. So too the external terror that is inflicted by terrorists, murderers, rapists, and
kidnappers can be a substitute for legitimate terror. Instead of facing the terror that
individuation would bring up in their souls—a task even more daunting than flying
into the World Trade Center—terrorists and criminal personalities act out terror on
their victims. But there is also an acting-in of terror. Instead of facing life’s spiritual
demands, we develop all sorts of neuroses and distractions, leading lives of quiet (or
nowadays, uncontrolled, consumer-driven) desperation.
That is why this is a terrible book: it forces us to embrace terror—legitimate terror—
as a necessary part of life. It puts a mirror to our face and shows us that our psychic
nature and what it demands of us is terrifying. In vividly conveying why we must
embrace terror, this book borders upon the mystical. Pinkola Estés comments on tikkun
olam, the Kabbalistic project of repairing and transforming the world: ‘When you face
Evil, you are facing it not only for yourself, but for all who live, all who once lived, and
Book reviews 379

for all who will one day be born’. Lowinsky adds to this when she says that ‘to know
terror . . . is an aspect of divinity. To ‘wrestle with God’ is not to repudiate or to deny
the divine. It is a form of relationship to God’. God also is forced to struggle when in
our terror we wrestle with him. As Jung said, ‘Whoever knows God has an effect on
Him’. Wrestling with God through our experiences of terror repairs, transforms, and
redeems Him, too.

Michael Gellert
C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles