Eros Ascending by John Maxwell Taylor

Author:John Maxwell Taylor [Taylor, John Maxwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-426-4
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

Transformative Knowledge and Resistance to Liberating Ideas

During a visualization exercise at a workshop led by Dr. Valerie Hunt years ago in which we were asked to connect with a high sense of purpose in our lives, what came up for me was “I am the eternal champion of the feminine principle.” When I toured for five years with my one-man play Forever Jung, five of the twenty characters I played were women, including Carl Jung’s wife Emma and his mistress Toni Wolffe. Both these powerful women were superb analysts in their own right and I felt honored to be embodying their thoughts, feelings, and lives on stage. The late Dr. Joseph Henderson, founder of the Jung Institute of San Francisco and contributor to the classic book on Jungian ideas, Man and His Symbols, worked with Jung and these two remarkable women for twelve years. He told me that they were instantly recognizable in my portrayals of them. As an actor, portraying Jung and his colleagues does not make me a certified psychologist. But it was impossible to walk in the psyche and skins of such people, night after night for such a long time, and not have their living ethos become part of my own substance. The result is both a blessing and a curse, the latter because of the acute, ongoing insight I now have into the shadow side of life and, more important for our purpose here, the ability to see when a man’s anima is acting out through him or when a woman has become possessed by her animus.

Telling people a truth they don’t want to hear is risky business. The shadow side of human nature does not like to be seen and will shape-shift or turn belligerent when handed information that points to psychological issues that the conscious mind does not want to recognize or address. Harley Street psychologist Dr. Maurice Nicoll, who was a direct disciple of both Jung and Gurdjieff, said that when he was interning in a mental hospital, he saw patients become extremely paranoid when confronted with truths they needed to face but couldn’t. They would quickly view everything said to them with deep suspicion and take the most innocent remark in the wrong way.

“Would you like some tea?”

“What do you mean … tea?”

The foregoing is recounted to alert you that this chapter contains information that can set people off, because it deals with unrecognized major issues for man and woman at this juncture in history.

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