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Lament for the Dead Psychology After Jung’s The Red Book Review; By James Hillman Sonu Shamdasani

“The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”
 
― C.G. Jung, preface for The Red Book: Liber Novus
 
James Hillman: I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead. It was a ritual and I think we don't do that with our hands. But opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead.
 
Sonu Shamdasani: It takes blood. That's what it takes. The work is Jung's `Book of the Dead.' His descent into the underworld, in which there's an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions.
Lament for the Dead, Psychology after Jung’s Red Book (2013) Pg. 1  
 
Begun in 1914, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s The Red Book lay dormant for almost 100 years before its eventual publication. Opinions are divided on whether Jung would have published the book if he had lived longer. He did send drafts to publishers early in life but seemed in no hurry to publish the book despite his advancing age. Regardless, it was of enormous importance to the psychologist, being shown to only a few confidants and family members. More importantly, the process of writing The Red Book was one of the most formative periods of Jung’s life. In the time that Jung worked on the book he came into direct experience with the forces of the deep mind and collective unconscious. For the remainder of his career he would use the experience to build concepts and theories about the unconscious and repressed parts of the human mind. 
In the broadest sense, Jungian psychology has two goals. 
 
Integrate and understand the deepest and most repressed parts of the the human mind 
 
and 
 
Don’t let them eat you alive in the process. 
 
Jungian psychology is about excavating the most repressed parts of self and learning to hold them so that we can know exactly who and what we are. Jung called this process individuation. Jungian psychology is not, and should not be understood as, an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt to build a psychological container for the forces of the unconscious. While not a religion, it served a similar function as a religion. Jungian psychology serves as both a protective buffer and a lens to understand and clarify the self. Jung described his psychology as a bridge to religion. His hope was that it could help psychology understand the functions of the human need for religion, mythology and the transcendental. Jung hoped that his psychology could make religion occupy a healthier, more mindful place in our culture by making the function of religion within humanity more conscious. 
 
Jung did not dislike religion. He viewed it as problematic when the symbols of religion became concretized and people took them literally. Jungian psychology itself has roots in Hindu religious traditions. Jung often recommended that patients of lapsed faith return to their religions of origin. He has case studies encouraging patients to resume Christian or Muslim religious practices as a source of healing and integration. Jung did have a caveat though. He recommended that patients return to their traditions with an open mind. Instead of viewing the religious traditions and prescriptive lists of rules or literal truths he asked patients to view them as metaphors for self discovery and processes for introspection. Jung saw no reason to make religious patients question their faith. He did see the need for patients who had abandoned religion to re-examine its purpose and function. 
 
The process of writing The Red Book was itself a religious experience for Jung. He realized after his falling out from Freud, that his own religious tradition and the available psychological framework was not enough to help him contain the raw and wuthering forces of his own unconscious that were assailing him at the time. Some scholars believe Jung was partially psychotic while writing The Red Book, others claim he was in a state of partial dissociation or simply use Jung’s term “active imagination”. 
 
The psychotic is drowning while the artist is swimming. The waters both inhabit, however, are the same. Written in a similar voice to the King James Bible, The Red Book has a religious and transcendent quality. It is written on vellum in heavy calligraphy with gorgeous hand illuminated script. Jung took inspiration for mystical and alchemical texts for its full page illustrations.
 
It is easier to define The Red Book by what it is not than by what it is. According to Jung, it is not a work of art. It is not a scholarly psychological endeavor. It is also not an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt for Jung to heal himself in a time of pain and save himself from madness by giving voice to the forces underneath his partial psychotic episode. The Red Book was a kind of container to help Jung witness the forces of the deep unconscious. In the same way, religion and Jungian psychology are containers for the ancient unconscious forces in the vast ocean under the human psyche.  
 
Lament of the Dead, Psychology after Carl Jung’s The Red Book is a dialogue between ex Jungian analyst James Hillman and Jungian scholar Sonu Shamdasani about the implications the Red Book has for Jungian psychology. Like the Red Book it was controversial when it was released. 
 
James Hillman was an early protege of Jung who later became a loud critic of parts of Jung’s psychology. Hillman wanted to create an “archetypal” psychology that would allow patients to directly experience and not merely analyze the psyche. His new psychology never really came together coherently and he never found the technique to validate his instinct. Hillman had been out of the Jungian fold for almost 30 years before he returned as a self appointed expert advisor during the publication of The Red Book. Hillman’s interest in The Red Book was enough to make him swallow his pride, and many previous statements, to join the Jungians once again. It is likely that the archetypal psychology he was trying to create is what The Red Book itself was describing. 
 
Sonu Shamdasani is not a psychologist but a scholar of the history of psychology. His insights have the detachment of the theoretical where Hillman’s are more felt and more intuitive but also more personal. One gets the sense in the book that Hillman is marveling painfully at an experience that he had been hungry for for a long time. The Red Book seems to help him clarify the disorganized blueprints of his stillborn psychological model. While there is a pain in Hillman’s words there is also a peace that was rare to hear from such a flamboyant and unsettled psychologist. 
 
Sonu Shamdasani is the perfect living dialogue partner for Hillman to have in the talks that make up Lament. Shamdasani has one of the best BS detectors of maybe any Jungian save David Tacey. Shamdasani has deftly avoided the fads, misappropriations and superficialization that have plagued the Jungian school for decades. As editor of the Red Book he knows more about the history and assembly of the text than any person save for Jung. Not only is he also one of the foremost living experts on Jung, but as a scholar he does not threaten the famously egotistical Hillman as a competing interpreting psychologist. The skin that Shamdasani has in this game is as an academic while Hillman gets to play the prophet and hero of the new psychology they describe without threat or competition. 
 
Presumedly these talks were recorded as research for a collaborative book to be co authored by the two friends and the death of Hillman in 2011 made the publication as a dialogue in 2013 a necessity. If that is not the case the format of a dialogue makes little sense. If that is the case it gives the book itself an almost mystical quality and elevates the conversation more to the spirit of a philosophical dialogue. 
 
We are only able to hear these men talk to each other and not to us. There is a deep reverberation between the resonant implications these men are seeing The Red Book have for modern psychology. However, they do not explain their insights to the reader and their understandings can only be glimpsed intuitively. Like the briefcase in the film Pulp Fiction the audience sees the object through its indirect effect on the characters. We see the foggy outlines of the ethics that these men hope will guide modern psychology but we are not quite able to see it as they see it. We have only an approximation through the context of their lives and their interpretation of Jung’s private diary. This enriches a text that is ultimately about the limitations of understanding.
 
One of the biggest criticisms of the book when it was published was that the terms the speaker used are never defined and thus the book's thesis is never objectivised or clarified. While this is true if you are an English professor, the mystic and the therapist in me see these limitations as the book’s strengths. The philosophical dialectic turns the conversation into an extended metaphor that indirectly supports the themes of the text. The medium enriches the message. Much like a socratic dialogue or a film script the the authors act more as characters and archetypes than essayists. The prophet and the scholar describe their function and limitations as gatekeepers of the spiritual experience. 
 
Reading the Lament, much like reading The Red Book, one gets the sense that one is witnessing a private but important moment in time. It is a moment that is not our moment and is only partially comprehensible to anyone but the author(s). Normally that would be a weakness but here it becomes a strength. Where normally the reader feels that a book is for them, here we feel that we are eavesdropping through a keyhole or from a phone line downstairs. The effect is superficially frustrating but also gives Lament a subtle quality to its spirituality that The Red Book lacks.  
 
Many of the obvious elements for a discussion of the enormous Red Book are completely ignored in the dialogue. Hillman and Shamdasani’s main takeaway is that The Red Book is about “the dead”. What they mean by “the dead” is never explained directly. This was a major sticking point for other reviewers, but I think their point works better undefined. They talk about the dead as a numinous term. Perhaps they are speaking about the reality of death itself. Perhaps about the dead of history. Perhaps they are describing the impenetrable veil we can see others enter but never see past ourselves. Maybe the concept contains all of these elements. Hillman, who was 82 at the time of having the conversations in Lament, may have been using The Red Book and his dialogue with Shamdasani to come to terms with his feelings about his own impending death. 
 
Perhaps it is undefined because these men are feeling something or intuitively, seeing something that the living lack the intellectual language for. It is not that the authors do not know what they are talking about. They know, but they are not able to completely say it.  Hillman was such an infuriatingly intuitive person that his biggest downfall in his other books is that he often felt truths that he could not articulate. Instead he retreated into arguing the merits of his credentials and background or into intellectual archival of his opinions on philosophers and artists. In other works this led to a didactic and self righteous tone that his writing is largely worse for. In Lament Hillman is forced to talk off the cuff and that limitation puts him at his best as a thinker. 
 
In his review of Lament, David Tacey has made the very good point that Jung abandoned the direction that The Red Book was taking him in. Jung saw it as a dead end for experiential psychology and retreated back into analytical inventorying of “archetypes”. On the publication of The Red Book, Jungians celebrate the book as the “culmination” of Jungian thought when instead it was merely a part of its origins. The Red Book represents a proto-Jungian psychology as Jung attempted to discover techniques for integration. Hillman and Shamdasani probe the psychology’s origins for hints of its future in Lament.
 
HIllman and Shamdasani’s thesis is partially a question about ethics and partially a question about cosmology. Are there any universal directions for living and behaving that Jungian psychology compels us towards (ethics)? Is there an external worldview that the, notoriously phenomenological, nature of Jungian psychology might imply (cosmology)? These are the major questions Hillman and Shamdasani confront in Lament.Their answer is not an answer as much as it is a question for the psychologists of the future. 
 
Their conclusion is that “the dead'' of our families, society, and human history foist their unlived life upon us. It is up to us, and our therapists, to help us deal with the burden of “the dead”. It is not us that live, but the dead that live through us. Hillman quotes W.H. Auden several times:
 
We are lived through powers that we pretend to understand.
 - W.H. Auden
 
A major tenant of Jungian psychology is that adult children struggle under the unlived life of the parent. The Jungian analyst helps the patient acknowledge and integrate all of the forces of the psyche that the parent ran from, so they are not passed down to future generations. A passive implication of the ethics and the cosmology laid out in Lament, is that to have a future we must reckon with not only the unlived life of the parent but also the unlived life of all the dead. 
 
It is our job as the living to answer the questions and face the contradictions our humanity posits in order to discover what we really are. The half truths and outright lies from the past masquerade as tradition for traditions sake, literalized religion, and unconscious tribal identity must be overthrown. The weight of the dead of history can remain immovable if we try to merely discard it but drowns us if we cling to it too tightly. We need to use our history and traditions to give us a container to reckon with the future. The container must remain flexible if we are to grow into our humanity as a society and an aware people. 
 
If you find yourself saying “Yes, but what does “the dead” mean!”  Then this book is not for you. If you find yourself confused but humbled by this thesis then perhaps it is. Instead of a further explanation of the ethical and cosmological future for psychology that his book posits I will give you a tangible example about how its message was liberatory for me. 
 
Hillman introduces the concepts of the book with his explanation of Jung’s reaction to the theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer. Jung hated Schweitzer.  He hated him because he had descended into Africa and “gone native”. In Jung’s mind Schweitzer had “refused the call”  to do anything  and “brought nothing home”. Surely the Africans that were fed and clothed felt they had been benefited! Was Jung’s ethics informed by racism, cluelessness, arrogance or some other unknown myopism?
A clue might be found in Jung’s reaction to modern art exploring the unconscious or in his relationship with Hinduism. Jung took the broad strokes of his psychology from the fundamentals of the brahman/atman and dharma/moksha dichotomies of Hinduism. Jung also despised the practice of eastern mysticism practices by westerners but admired it in Easterners. Why? His psychology stole something theoretical that his ethics disallowed in direct practice. 
 
Jung’s views on contemporary (modern) artists of his time were similar. He did not want to look at depictions of the raw elements of the unconscious. In his mind discarding all the lessons of classicism was a “cop out”.  He viewed artists that descended into the abstract with no path back or acknowledgement of the history that gave them that path as failures. He wanted artists to make the descent into the subjective world and return with a torch of it’s fire but not be consumed by it blaze. Depicting the direct experience of the unconscious was the mark of a failed artist to Jung. To Jung the destination was the point, not the journey. The only thing that mattered is what you were able to bring back from the world of the dead. He had managed to contain these things in The Red Book, why couldn’t they? The Red Book was Jung’s golden bough. 
 
Jung took steps to keep the art in The Red Book both outside of the modernist tradition and beyond the historical tradition. The Red Book uses a partially medieval format but Jung both celebrates and overcomes the constraints of his chosen style. The Red Book was not modern or historical, it was Jung’s experience of both. In Lament, Hillman describes this as the ethics that should inform modern psychology. Life should become ones own but part of ones self ownership is that we take responsibility for driving a tradition forward not a slave to repeating it.
 
Oddly enough the idea of descent and return will already be familiar to many Americans through the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell took the same ethics of descent and return to the unconscious as the model of his “monomyth” model of storytelling. This briefly influenced psychology and comparative religion in the US and had major impact on screenwriters to this day. Campbells ethics are the same as Jung’s. If one becomes stuck on the monomyth wheel, or the journey of the descent and return, one is no longer the protagonist and becomes an antagonist.  Campbell, and American post jungians in general were not alway great attributing influences and credit where it was due. 
 
Jung was suspicious of the new age theosophists and psychadelic psychonauts that became enamored with the structure of the unconscious for the unconscious sake. Where Lament shines is when Hillman explains the ethics behind Jung’s thinking. Jung lightly implied this ethics but was, as Hillman points out, probably not entirely conscious of it. One of Lament’s biggest strengths and weaknesses is that it sees through the misappropriations of Jungian psychology over the last hundred years. Both of the dialogue’s figures know the man of Jung so well that they do not need to address how he was misperceived by the public. They also know the limitations of the knowable. 
 
This is another lesson that is discussed in Lament. Can modern psychology know what it can’t know? That is my biggest complaint with the profession as it currently exists. Modern psychology seems content to retreat into research and objectivism. The medical, corporate, credentialist and academic restructuring of psychology in the nineteen eighties certainly furthered that problem. Jung did not believe that the descent into the unconscious without any hope of return was a path forward for psychology. This is why he abandoned the path The Red Book led him down. Can psychology let go of the objective and the researchable enough to embrace the limits of the knowable? Can we come to terms with limitations enough to heal an ego inflated world that sees no limits to growth?
 
I don’t know but I sincerely hope so. 
 
I said that I would provide a tangible example of the application of this book in it’s review,  so here it is:
 
I have always been enamored with James Hillman. He was by all accounts a brilliant analyst. He also was an incredibly intelligent person. That intellect did not save him. Hillman ended his career as a crank and a failure in my mind. In this book you see Hillman contemplate that failure. You also see Hillman attempt to redeem himself as he glimpses the unglimpseable. He sees something in the Red Book that he allows to clarify his earlier attempt to revision psychology. 
 
Hillman's attempt to reinvent Jungian psychology as archetypal psychology was wildly derided. Largely, because it never found any language or technique for application and practice. Hillman himself admitted that he did not know how to practice archetypal psychology. It's easy to laugh at somebody who claims to have reinvented psychology and can't even tell you what you do with their revolutionary invention.
 
However, I will admit that I think Hillman was right. He knew that he was but he didnt know how he was right. It is a mark of arrogance to see yourself as correct without evidence. Hillman was often arrogant but I think here he was not. Many Jungian analysts would leave the Jungian institutes through the 70, 80s and 90s to start somatic and experiential psychology that used Jung as a map but the connection between the body and the brain as a technique. These models made room for a direct experience in psychology that Jungian analysis does not often do. It added an element that Jung himself had practiced in the writing of The Red Book. Hillman never found this technique but he was correct about the path he saw forward for psychology. He knew what was missing. 
 
I started Taproot Therapy Collective because I felt a calling to dig up the Jungian techniques of my parent’s generation and reify them. I saw those as the most viable map towards the future of psychology, even though American psychology had largely forgotten them. I also saw them devoid of a practical technique or application for a world where years of analysis cost more than most trauma patients will make in a lifetime. I feel that experiential and brain based medicine techniques like brainspotting are the future of the profession. 
 
Pathways like brainspotting, sensorimotor therapy, somatic experiencing, neurostimulation, ketamine, psilocybin or any technique that allows the direct experience of the subcortical brain is the path forward to treat trauma. These things will be at odds with the medicalized, corporate, and credentialized nature of healthcare. I knew that this would be a poorly understood path that few people, even the well intentioned, could see. I would never have found it if I had refused the call of “the dead”. 
 
Lament is relevant because none of those realizations is somewhere that I ever would have gotten without the tradition that I am standing on top of. I am as, Isaac Newton said, standing on the shoulders of giants. Except Isaac Newton didn't invent that phrase. It was associated with him but he was standing on the tradition of the dead to utter a phrase first recorded in the medieval period. The author of its origin is unknown because they are, well, dead. They have no one to give their eulogy. 
 
The ethics and the cosmology of Lament, is that our lives are meant to be a eulogy for our dead. Lament, makes every honest eulogy in history become an ethics and by extension a cosmology. Read Pericles eulogy from the Peloponesian war in Thucydides. How much of these lessons are still unlearned? I would feel disingenuous in my career unless I tell you who those giants are that I stand on. They are David Tacey, John Beebe, Sonu Shamdasani, Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, Karen Horney, and Hal Stone. Many others also.
 
I would never have heard the voice of James Hillman inside myself unless I had learned to listen to the dead from his voice beyond the grave. It would have been easy for me to merely critize his failures instead of seeing them as incomplete truths. Hillman died with many things incomplete, as we all inevitably will. Lament helped me clarify the voices that I was hearing in the profession. Lament of the Dead is a fascinating read not because it tells us exactly what to do with the dead, or even what they are. Lament is fascinating because it helps us to see a mindful path forward between innovation and tradition. 
 
The contents of the collective unconscious cannot be contained by one individual. Just as Jungian psychology is meant to be a container to help an individual integrate the forces of the collective unconscious, attention to the unlived life of the historical dead can be a kind of container for culture. Similarly to Jungian psychology the container is not meant to be literalized or turned into a prison. It is a lens and a buffer to protect us until we are ready and allow us to see ourselves more clearly once we are. Our project is to go further in the journey of knowing ourselves where our ancestors failed to. Our mindful life is the product of the unlived life of the dead; it is the work of our life that is their lament. 
 

Interview with John Beebe on the MBTI Typology

A popular lecturer in the Jungian world, Beebe has spoken on topics related to the theory and practical applications of Analytical psychology to professional and lay audiences throughout the United States and around the world. He has been especially active in introducing training in Jungian psychology in China. Beebe is the founding editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, now called Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.[2] He was the first American co-editor of the London-based Journal of Analytical Psychology.
Beebe has also published in The Chiron Clinical Series, Fort Da, Harvest, The Inner Edge, Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychological Perspectives, The Psychoanalytic Review, Quadrant, Spring, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Theory and Psychology, and Tikkun among others. He has contributed book chapters to The Anne Rice Reader, The Cambridge Companion to Jung, From Tradition to Innovation, House, Humanizing Evil, Initiation, Jungian Perspectives on Clinical Supervision, New Approaches to Dream Interpretation, Post-Jungians Today, Psyche & City, The Psychology of Mature Spirituality, Same-Sex Love, The Soul of Popular Culture, and Teaching Jung.
With Donald Sandner, Beebe is the author of "Psychopathology and Analysis",[3] an article on Jungian complex theory used in many training programs, and with Thomas Kirsch and Joe Cambray the author of "What Freudians Can Learn from Jung".[4] He is the author of the book Integrity in Depth, a study of the archetype of integrity, and of Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness.

Interview on Bollingen Tower with Martin Gledhill

Mr. Martin Gledhill BSc, BArch MA is working on a book about Carl Jung's Bolingen Tower. Martin is a senior teaching fellow in the Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering, focusing on the symbolism and spirituality of architecture. The Bollingen Tower is a home built by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. In appearance, it is a small castle with four towers. It is located in the village of Bollingen on the shore of Lake Zürich. Jung bought the land in 1922 after the death of his mother. In 1923 he built a two-story round tower on this land. It was a stone structure suitable to be lived in. Additions to this tower were constructed in 1927, 1931, and 1935, resulting in a building that has four connected parts.  A second story was added to the 1927 addition after the death of Jung's wife in 1955, signifying "an extension of consciousness achieved in old age." For much of his life Jung spent several months each year living at Bollingen. The Tower is now owned by a family trust and is not open to the public.
 
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Interview with David Tacey on Carl Jung, Mysticism, and the Politics of Religion

Dr. David Tacey is a professor in literature and depth psychology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of eight books, including Jung and the New Age (2001), The Spirituality Revolution (2003) and How to Read Jung (2006).He was born in Melbourne and raised in Alice Springs, central Australia. It was here that he was influenced by Aboriginal cultures and their religion and cosmology. After completing a PhD degree at the University of Adelaide, David Tacey was a Harkness Fellow in the United States, where his studies were supervised by James Hillman.He regularly gives lecture courses at the summer school of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich.
I grew up reading David Tacey so it's extremely exciting to get to sit down and talk to him. He was very generous with his time. Many of his books and articles are no longer in print or are behind hefty paywalls. One of the things that he offers in this interview is that any listener can send him an e-mail to request essays that were in academic journals no longer in print and he will send you the PDF. Please take him up on that as he is a fascinating writer.
 
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Dr. David Tacey is a professor in literature and depth psychology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of eight books, including Jung and the New Age (2001), The Spirituality Revolution (2003) and How to Read Jung (2006).He was born in Melbourne and raised in Alice Springs, central Australia. It was here that he was influenced by Aboriginal cultures and their religion and cosmology. After completing a PhD degree at the University of Adelaide, David Tacey was a Harkness Fellow in the United States, where his studies were supervised by James Hillman.He regularly gives lecture courses at the summer school of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich.
I grew up reading David Tacey so it's extremely exciting to get to sit down and talk to him. He was very generous with his time. Many of his books and articles are no longer in print or are behind hefty paywalls. One of the things that he offers in this interview is that any listener can send him an e-mail to request essays that were in academic journals no longer in print and he will send you the PDF. Please take him up on that as he is a fascinating writer.
#mythology #religion #symbolism #allegory #metaphor #Jung #existentialism #depthpsychology #anthropology #sociology #politics #myth #comparativereligion #hinduism #christianity 
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Interview with A. Savage of the Parquet Courts Psychology of Visual Art and Music

Andy Savage is a brilliant visual and musical artist. As front man of the Parquet Courts he has seven ground breaking rock albums. As a visual artist he is makes beautiful impressionist work that has echoes of Wassily Kandinsky, playful modernism of Paul Klee and even the murals of Emil Bisttram. We are so grateful for his time with us and his body of work in the world. Here he talks about his process and personality as it relates to art. 
Check out his other work here:
Music@ https://www.parquet-courts.com/
Visual Art@ https://a-savage.com/
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Does Brainspotting work? What to do when Brainspotting doesn’t work?

Brainspotting is not a scam! It is an incredibly effective evidence based practice. I try to make videos about the most common phone calls we get at Taproot Therapy Collective. One of the calls that I get is that Brainspotting with a clinician in a another state or country just isn't working. There are thousands of BSP techniques. Patient's call because there clinician is not doing what I do in my videos, and that is fine! One of my favorite things about the BSP approach is that it is so open ended. I think that all of that freedom can be little overwhelming to new BSP clinicians. Especially clinicians coming from EMDR backgrounds. If you are a patient or a clinician having trouble processing with BSP these are some suggestions to help the process along. #Brainspotting #trauma #dualatunement #chaostheory #uncertaintyprinciple #EMDR #tailofthecomet #EMDR #therapy #PTSD #psychotherapy #cptsd #mbti #did
 
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Stellate Ganglion Block for Trauma and PTSD - Interview with Dr. James Lynch

Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB)—a medical procedure that effectively treats symptoms associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—is an injection of local anesthetic in the neck to temporarily block the cervical sympathetic chain which controls the body’s fight-or-flight response. 
​SGB has been safely used for over 80 years for many other reasons but was discovered ten years ago to provide relief of PTSD symptoms as well.  Since that time, along with a handful of other physicians, I have pioneered the use of SGB for treating posttraumatic stress within the US Army.  Due to its safety, success rate, and rapid onset of relief, SGB has gained wide acceptance in several locations at US military hospitals where it has been available.  
https://www.drjameslynch.com/
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The 3 Personalities of Karen Horney Feminist Psychoanalyst

Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst. Her career came into prominence in the nineteentwenties when she formed theories on human attachment and neurosis that split from Freud’skey ideas. Horney’s theory of personality development and individuation are still highly relevantto modern theories of personality, attachment psychology and psychological trauma. Eventhough she is not well remembered, her work is as relevant as it was at the turn of the century.Applying her theories to my work with patients and to my own life has been an integral piece ofmy own personal and professional development. This article is part one of four in a seriesexplaining Horney’s theories.
At the time of this writing my daughter is two. Sometimes when my wife and I relax slightly inpublic, she will get a glimmer in her eye and, starting to giggle, run away from us. While we willyell for her to stop, she will cackle drunk with her new found power, as she runs away into acrowd of strangers or into oncoming traffic. When we take her to school or to meet new peopleshe wraps herself around my wife’s leg, pressing her cheek into my wife’s calf, and refuses toSpeak.
Two year old children cannot understand moderation or limitation. They demand to have “morefood” even when their plate is overflowing. Minutes later they will refuse to eat another bitebecause they are “full”. They cannot understand shades of gray. They refuse to believe thatthey need a nap until their eyes are closing. People are either all “bad guys” or all “good guys”.Individual children live in a world of extremes with tunnel vision on their immediate presentdesires and realities.
Infants do not understand that they are separate creatures from their mother. The firsttraumatic event in an infant’s life is the separation from the mother as the infantbecomes a toddler. Infants are connected to the mother for so much of their post birthexperience. In order to soothe infants we try to make them feel as though they are still in thewomb. We swaddle infants, keep them warm, and play white noise. The mother is both theirsource of physical comfort and nourishment. So much of the infant’s conscious experience iscentered on its connection to its mother, that it makes sense that infants would lack the ability tounderstand what they are outside of the central reality of their experience.
For the nine months in the womb an infant is physically and psychologically dependent on itsmother. It takes at least one and a half years after being born for infants to begin to piecetogether that they will have to eventually become something separate from their mother.Because infants cannot understand their existence without their mother, this means that whenthey are inevitably forced to separate from their mother, infants feel like their existence is underthreat. The necessary task of the mother is to separate the child from herself into itself. Yet, thisfeels to the child like it is being obliterated. This is often the first major trauma of a child’s life.
Karen Horney’s theory of personality and neurosis is built on examining its effect on an infant’sdevelopment. When toddlers begin to be separated from their mothers they experiencemoments where they, like my daughter, think they are God and can run through traffic. They arecompletely independant, completely free, can do things “by themself”, and will never needsupervision or approval from parents again. They quickly alternate into periods of abject terrorwhere they are horrified with their agency as an independent being and, often wrappingthemselves around her leg, attempt to remerge with their mother.
The distinction between infant and toddler is between a creature that can not live independentlyand a creature that sometimes thinks it can. Toddlers alternate between rejecting all authority tobecome a god and trying to crawl back into the womb in order to forget they exist. Our ego iswhat allows us to navigate the overwhelming forces of the unconscious. The ego allows us toaccept both our autonomy and reconcile our own ultimate insignificance. Toddlers are justbeginning to develop an ego that will synthesize these competing, and contradictory realities.As a trauma therapist I use Horney’s theories constantly. The connection between the way thatour parents give us attention and the way we learn to get attention from others in later life isendlessly relevant in many types of therapy, especially work with trauma. In Horney’s theory ofneurosis, the way that a child individuates from their mother determines their coping style andpredicts many of the psychological issues they may develop in later life.
Moving Towards People
Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst. Her career came into prominence in the nineteentwenties when she formed theories on human attachment and neurosis that split from Freud’skey ideas. Horney’s theory of personality development and individuation are still highly relevantto modern theories of personality, attachment psychology and psychological trauma.Horney observed that children deploy three different coping styles during the time they areindividuating from the mother. Ideally children learn mastery in the three different styles. Inimperfect situations infants become over dependent in one style and form a neurotic and rigidpersonality style. This second part of a four part article will explore the moving towards peoplepersonality style.
The first coping strategy that children will attempt in order to retain the connection with themother during individuation is to ask for help Horney called this stage moving towards people.As infants we cry in order to make our mothers come running to our aid. If our mother’s continueto come running to our aid for the rest of childhood however, this can impair our development aswe fail to learn to solve our own problems internally or assert ourselves. In extreme caseswhere mothers will not separate from a child to allow room for experimentation with assertive
aggression or self soothing behavior the child becomes neurotic and co-dependant in themoving towards people style.People and characters with this level of impairment see the entire world in terms of their motherand never learn to make their own judgements or form their own values. What would motherthink of this? That is against mother’s rules. Another force like a charismatic leader, romanticpartner or social identity may replace the actual mother at some point, but the inability to be aseparate person will remain. Persons over dependent on another person or group’s ego haveno ability to self soothe without the warm glow of the surrogate mother’s approval and ability todefine rules and worth.
Horney calls this neurosis the need for affection and approval. The sense of self in people withthis personality type is incredibly diffuse as they are not able to watch others withdraw theirapproval even for good reason. The psychologist Albert Ellis used to tell his patients that “It ispathological to want to be liked by everybody all the time”. I often tell mine that “There are timeswhen the loving or the honest thing to do is to piss someone off”. When we cannot stand to seeour standards judged by other people it means that we cannot have a stable sense of self withauthentic standards for self worth.
This need often manifests as a form of codependency in relationships or friendships as peopletry to replace the stabilizing presence of a controlling caregiver with a different set of rules andboundaries. We learn to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing what to do and being forced tochoose early in life. When we have not been allowed to adapt to making small choices over thelife course we decompensate in the face of larger overwhelming choices about our life andIdentity.
In therapy I encounter patients who have had a controlling caregiver, and a correspondinginability to develop their own sense of identity. I start by asking them simple questions aboutwho they are. Patients with an underdeveloped sense of personal identity will often have noidea what their basic preferences and beliefs are. Often they will have found an abusive partneror a rigid social, political, or religious group to fill up the “blank” spaces in their identity with. Inhealthy partnerships we are allowed to maintain our own sense of identity while still participatingin a group affiliation or romantic partnership.
I always frame the therapy with these patients as an exciting adventure that we are going ontogether. We are going to discover who the patient is and who they want to become. Patients ofthis coping style often will try and figure out what the therapist wants them to do and what the“new rules” that the therapist has for their life are. Their primary fear is that they will dosomething “wrong” and don't know what the “right” answers are to their life questions. I tellpatients that “You are the only best expert in how to be you”.
While the freedom and gray area of this kind of personality development therapy is initiallyterrifying to patients, eventually this style of therapy becomes exhilarating as patients reconnectto a long absent sense of self. Even though patients present to therapy blank and indifferent about their, often abusive and traumatic history, they will start to recognize moments in the pastwhen they had a strong emotion or a preference that was dismissed by a caregiver or a partner.“I was so angry that my clothes were picked out for me every day”. “I was told that goodchristians don’t go to prom”.
Not all people in the moving towards people neurotic type will use a partner to try andcomplete their functioning. Oftentimes I have patients with social and intellectual gifts that useadmiration, fame or envy in order to move towards people. Many people seek fame or attention,but those with a moving towards people neurosis will not be able to function withoutadmiration of others. These patients are not able to determine the value or morality of theirbehavior without group approval.
Moving Against People
Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst. Her career came into prominence in the nineteentwenties when she formed theories on human attachment and neurosis that split from Freud’skey ideas. Horney’s theory of personality development and individuation are still highly relevantto modern theories of personality, attachment psychology and psychological trauma. This thirdpart of a four part article will explore the moving against people personality style.
In Horney’s theory of individuation, the individuating child will settle into one of three differentpersonality styles based on what allows it to successfully reclaim its parent’s attention. The first style that children try is the moving towards people style. This is most familiar to the child since this is the style they are accustomed to using in infancy. If this asking for attention and attempting to be close to the mother through affection fail, the child will next try aggression in order to force it’s caregiver to give it what it wants. If only aggression is effective the child willsettle firmly into a moving against people personality style.
People in the moving against people personality style had sporadic or unpredictable affectionoffered to them as children. They came from environments that were hostile or uncaring andhandled the fundamental insecurity that these environments engendered by becomingaggressive. They never had the option of asking for the basic attention children need andinstead learned to demand attention. Caregivers were neglectful and unresponsive until thesefought for the little affection or attention available in their home.
This reality in their family of origin colors these patient’s interpersonal style and assumptionsabout the world. These assumptions about others and the world are immediately recognizable inthe first few minutes of the first therapy session when a patient in the moving against peoplepersonality style presents to therapy. Patients in the moving against people personality style are not likely to come to therapy and do not usually present to therapy until they are in crisis orare facing significant personal or professional losses due to their rigidity.
Just as patients in the moving towards people personality type often have anger turned off,patients in the moving against people personality type are often out of touch with their abilityto feel hurt or vulnerable. To ward this feeling off patients in theis personality style develop a“don’t mess with me” defensive posture. They may use wit as a weapon becoming acerbicallyfunny. They maybe overly macho or simply act like they don’t care what anyone thinks.
Most often patients who are neurotic in the moving against people personality style are highlycompetitive and motivated to dominate athletics, group functions and professional environments. Patients in this style are often high achievers when they are skilled. They areseen as invulnerable at work but often feel hollow in personal spheres. They are unable tounderstand the point of life without comparison and competition. Patients often present totherapy in middle age when there is “nothing else left to win”.
Moving Away From People
Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst. Her career came into prominence in the nineteentwenties when she formed theories on human attachment and neurosis that split from Freud’skey ideas. Horney’s theory of personality development and individuation are still highly relevantto modern theories of personality, attachment psychology and psychological trauma.
Horney observed that children deploy three different coping styles during the time they areindividuating from the mother. Ideally children learn mastery in the three different styles. Inimperfect situations infants become over dependent in one style and form a neurotic and rigidpersonality style. This second part of a four part article will explore the moving away frompeople personality style. 
Horney’s three neurotic personality styles can most simply be understood as dependency (moving towards people), Aggression (moving against people) and resignation (moving away from people). The resigned type is the result of the developing child discovering that they are unable to get the attention of the parent either through asking for attention or demanding it. The child then retreats into an innerworld where it creates its own systems of psychological reward through creativity and self expansion.
If you are a writer or a psychotherapist it is highly likely that you are strongly developed in thisarea even if you are not quite a neurotic! The ability to move into your head and create your ownrules and concepts for life is a useful skill, but not one we learn from asking or demandingattention from our parents. These personality types are more able to see through the arbitrarynature of the rules or traditions in a society, and have less attachment to the cultural rules.
Unless these children develop ways of communicating these inner worlds they can seem“spacey” or “lost in their thoughts”. All of the neuroses that Horeney observes can be understood as the limiting conditions that a person with insecure attachment has for being safe. The dependent type needs others to feel safe, while the aggressive type needs control. A person in the “moving away from people” neurotic type only feels safe when some inner condition of solitude or independance has been fulfilled. This ultimate value of independence can present in several ways. Some want to be invisible, living an unassuming and private life. Sometimes the fixation on independence manifests and living off the land, being wealthy, and sometimes as being emotionally independent. Patients in this style may emulate, Jay Gatsby, Jeremiah Johnson or John Wayne.
The moving away from people’s personality type is not comfortable unless they are absolutelyindependent in some special area. While the moving towards people type needs people in orderto function, and the moving against people personality type needs people in order to becomedominant, the moving away from people type feels unsafe if it needs people for anythingsubstantial. This does not mean that they are unsuccessful socially, only that they areuncomfortable with relying on social or emotional ties to others in order to feel stable. This typefailed to maintain a connection with their mother through either dependence seeking oraggressive behaviors. 
They learned to soothe themselves and learned their own coping skills.This process of learning to regulate ones own emotions as a child without assistance leadschildren into their own head where they develop a large and elaborate inner world. Childrenbecome less interested or even aware of external realities like norms, socially, or practicaltasks. Instead of learning to manage their feelings they become fascinated with them. 
Moving away from people personality type patients have a unique knack for encoding their beliefs, personality and opinions into artistic creations because they crave the recognition andunderstanding that was denied them by their caregivers as children. Art, humor, fashion,business even, is a way of communicating something about the hidden self to others.