Bobbing for Apples 2 comments

28 May 2003 @ 16:28, by Quidnovi And one of the elders of the city said, Speak to us of Good and Evil. And he answered: Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters. You are good when you are one with yourself. Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil. For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house. -----Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet Fictitious Superiority from The Collected Works of Lydia Sicher: An Adlerian perspective "We do not always strive for genuine power, more often for the feeling of power. We want not so much to be superior as to feel superior. Frequently, we attain the feeling of superiority by following paths that lead us increasingly away from reality." ------Principles of Individual Psychology An unpublished manuscript in the AAISF/ATP Archives A goal of personal superiority is one in which the individual strives to overcome and be above others. This type of goal is pushed further and further out so that the person cannot be outdone anymore. These goals all go in the same direction: superiority over others, face-saving, prestige. All goals of personal superiority are unreachable, fictitious, goals of Godlikeness, of perfection, absoluteness, and many times are expressed in a specific form. Insane individuals live "as if" they had reached their ultimate goal of perfection, for example, they are Christ. Neurotics live their lives explaining to themselves and others the reasons they did not reach their goals of perfection. Personal goals of superiority should not be confused with Adler's notions of the natural human movement to overcome a feeling of inferiority and to move from a minus to a plus situation. In general, security can be viewed as some situation of superiority, or assumed superiority. This can be a situation of knowledge superiority, position superiority, or whatever a person might consider the realm of superiority over others. The more inferior individuals think they are, the more superiority they will have to gain in order to think they are really secure. Eventually what can be seen in all these neurotic and psychotic patients is that security, in their opinion, can only be obtained if they themselves have reached a point where they cannot be outdone anymore. This would be a point where they would now think that there is no one higher than they are, or more advanced than they are. ===================================================================================================== Sicher worked under Adler when he was Director of the Clinic for Nervous Diseases at the Mariahilfer, Franz-Josef Ambulatorium in Vienna, which Adler had started. When Adler left Vienna for the United States to assume the chair of Medical Psychology at Long Island University in 1929, he appointed Sicher as his successor as Director of the Clinic (with Franz Plewa as her assistant) and of the Viennese Society of Individual Psychology. Sicher headed the department until it was closed by Hitler nine years later. More > ==================================================================================================== Encounters with the Soul Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung ----Barbara Hannab "A little learning is a dang'rous thing Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring, There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain And drinking largely sobers us again" ----Alexander Pope "The inner world is just as real as the outside world with which we are familiar; in fact, it is more real, for it is infinite and everlasting and does not change and decay as the outside world constantly does. To those who remember the world as it was before 1914, the present world is so utterly changed that it seems to be a different world altogether..." "Jung once told me that the unconscious itself was not dangerous. There was only one real danger, he said, but that was a very serious one: Panic! The fear that grips a person when something very unexpected confronts him, or when he begins to be afraid of losing his footing in the conscious world, can upset him so much that it is really no wonder that so few people embark on the task. Indeed, it is necessary to have secure roots and to be well established in the outer world before it is wise to make any such attempt. We must remember that Jung was a married man with several children, with his own house and garden on the lake, and with unusual success in his profession before he undertook his own “confrontation with the unconscious.” He points out in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that Nietzsche undertook the same journey when he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, and was blown away like a leaf because he had no roots nor obligations in the outer world." ===================================================================================================== In her book, Encounters with the Soul, Barbara Hannah explores Jung’s method of “active imagination”, often considered the most powerful tool in analytical psychology for achieving direct contact with the unconscious and attaining greater inner awareness. Using historical and contemporary case studies, Hannah traces the human journey toward personal wholeness. This approach to confronting the unconscious is a healing process that applies to both men and women and deals in depth with the injured feminine as well as many powerful archetypal forces. Barbara Hannah was born in England and went to Zurich in the 1920s to study with C. G. Jung. She remained in Switzerland where she was a practicing analyst and teacher at the C. G. Jung Institute. More on Jung and Active Imagination ====================================================================================================

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