Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
An individual’s harmony with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.
I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.
Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.
The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.
The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it’s also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don’t see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that’s been there all along.
If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek’s Hermes, the Roman’s Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.
Art, for example, becomes “art therapy.” When patients make music, it becomes “music therapy.” When the arts are used for “therapy” in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.
The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm’s length because they are so full of love.
Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn’t do anything-or that it doesn’t do enough.
From my perspective as a depth psychologist, I see that those who have a connection with story are in better shape and have better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced.
I am not caused by my history-my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.
Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.
Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver’s seat.
Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being. I think it’s the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it’s right here.
Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way – whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.
By seeing differently, we do differently.