Seattle Jungian-Oriented Therapist Elizabeth Clark-Stern's New Book

Elizabeth Clark-Stern, MA, recently published her newest book: Soul Stories: Safari to Mara & Aria of the Horned Toad (2011).
Content from marketing materials (http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=index&manufacturers_id=19):
The characters in Soul Stories are so alive and compelling that they jump off the page right into your heart. Clark-Stern has the rare ability to blend her imaginative poetic voice with exciting page turning plots. Soul Stories will not only touch and engage young readers but are great adventures that will appeal to all ages."

Beverly Olevin, winner of Kirkus Discoveries Best Fiction 2010 The Good Side of Bad

Soul Stories explores two worlds: the world we know with our feelings and senses--sight, scent, touch, belonging, joy, loss, renewal--and the parallel world of dreams, intuition, imagination, and the dimension of the unknown. Together these realms inform, shape, challenge, and nurture the soul. 

Safari to Mara finds our heroine on the brink of womanhood in Masai society. The only daughter in a sonless family, she is drafted to do work in the modern world, yet tradition calls her to prepare for initiation as a wife. In the wilderness of her namesake, Kenya’s Masai Mara, she finds an improbable guide who leads her into the mysterious recesses of her awakening heart.

Aria of the Horned Toad begins with the dream of a horned toad crawling out of Beatrice’s eyes,“so real I could feel his prickly little feet on my nose.” And so begins an odyssey to the source of all dreaming. Beatrice believes that in this dark and luminous place, she can find someone to fashion a dream to fix her Mama’s terrible ways, and soothe the longing in her own wild spirit.

About the Author: Elizabeth Clark-Stern is a psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle,Washington. Before embracing this beloved work, she worked as a professional screenwriter. Her produced plays and teleplays include All I Could See From Where I Stood, Help Wanted, and To See The Elephant. Her play, Out of the Shadows: A Story of Toni Wolff and Emma Jung, was performed at the International Jungian Congress in South Africa in 2007.

Product Details:

Trade Paperback: 180 pages

Publisher: Genoa House; First edition (June 21, 2011)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1926975006

ISBN-13: 978-1926975009

Clark-Stern, E. (2011). Soul stories: Safari to Mara and Aria of the horned-toad. Hamilton, ON: Genoa House.

Quotation about Working with the Opposites

Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terrence Dawson’s text offers remarkable information about Jungian concepts. One of the students in my spring quarter, 2011, Advanced Theories: Jungian course quoted the following in his final synthesis paper:

Jung enters the conversation of opposites, lets each side have its say, endures the struggle between the opposing point of view, suffers the anguish of being strung out between them, greets the resolving symbol with gratitude. The psyche, says Jung, arrives at a third point of view that includes the essence of each conflicting perspective while at the same time combining them into a new symbol. We must enter this process and cooperate with it if we are to be fully—and ethically—engaged in living. (Ulanov, as cited in Young-Eisendrath & Dawson, 2009, p. 328)

Young-Eisendrath, P., & Dawson, T. (Eds.). (2009). The Cambridge companion to Jung (2^nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Red Book Study Group

During a recent Red Book Study Group Meeting (June 12, 2011), I was struck by the following quotation (see below) from Jung's personal diary. Jung was grappling with external pressures (spirit of the times) versus internal pressure (spirit of the depths). Jung eloquently and cryptically described the process of literal versus symbolic murder of "the princes"--the external authorities and heroes. Instead, Jung suggested that we internalize this struggle to face and embrace our own incapacity, limitations, and true human nature.

But our ruler is the spirit of this time, which rules and leads in us all. It is the general spirit in which we think and act today. He is of frightful power, since he has brought immeasurable good to this world and fascinated men with unbelievable pleasure. He [sic] is bejeweled with the most beautiful heroic virtue, and wants to drive men [sic] up to the brightest solar heights, in everlasting ascent.

The hero wants to open up everything he can. But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man [sic] cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent. Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life. For how else shall it develop into ability?

We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it. But that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity will overcame us and demand its share of life. Our ability will desert us, and will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss. Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capacity.

The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands. If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity and into even worse. Our foundation will be caught up in the excitement since our highest tension, which concerns what lies outside us, will stir them up. We will fall into the cesspool of our underworld, among the rubble of the centuries in us.

The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. Consequently, you sin against incapacity. But incapability exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down. (p. 240)

 References

Shamdasani, S. (Ed.). (2009). The red book: Liber novus by C. G. Jung. New York, NY: Norton.

Legacy and Influence

50th Anniversary of Carl Gustaf Jung's Death
Carl Jung – Legacy and Influence

2nd Jun 2011; 13:00

RSA Thursday

June, 2011, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Carl Jung, one of the 20th century's most influential, and controversial, psychologists and thinkers. If you've ever thought of yourself as an extrovert or introvert, or done a Myers-Briggs test, Jung is to blame. If you've ever sat opposite a counsellor, rather than laid on a couch, Jung was the first to practice therapy this way. If you've ever cursed, or praised, the New Age, Jung has shaped your mind again.

But what of his legacy, what of his influence 50 years on? And what of the controversy too, for Jung has also been accused of everything from anti-semitism to mystical obscurantism.

Mark Vernon chairs a discussion with two leading experts on Jung, each offering a different perspective: Robert Rowland-Smith, philosopher, consultant, columnist and author and Gary Lachman; author of Jung The Mystic and bass-player and composer in a band called Blondie.

Listen here:

Legacy and Influence

Photo Credit: Borrowed from dreamthisday.com

Carl Jung

"One does not become enlightened 
by imagining 
figures of 
light, 
but by 
making the 
darkness
conscious."

Photo Credit: Borrowed from runningcauseican'tfly.blogspot

Quotes from Jung’s Matter of Heart

“The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the sine qua non of the world as an object. It is in the highest degree odd that Western man, with but very few and ever fewer exceptions, apparently pays so little regard to this fact.

Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of all knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming nonexistence.”

C. G. Jung, 1946

Collected Works 8, para. 357

“Not nature but the “genius of mankind” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.”

C. G. Jung, 1952

C. W. 11, para. 734

“Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves.

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.

That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”

C. G. Jung, 1959

C. W. 9, II, para. 126

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. All my works, all my creative activities, have come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.”

C. G. Jung, 1961

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (paperback, p. 183).

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.

Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. All my works, all my creative activities, have come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.”

C. G. Jung, 1961

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (paperback, p. 183)

“Biographies should show people in their undershirts. Goethe had his weaknesses, and Calvin was often cruel. Considerations of this kind reveal the true greatness of a man. This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship!”

C. G. Jung, 1946

C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 165

“The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual.

This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals.

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”

C. G. Jung, 1934

C. W. 10, para. 315

“In our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.”

Emma Jung, 1955

Anima and Amimus, p. 87

“After my wife’s death in 1955, I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden, was myself! I could no longer hide myself behind the “maternal” and the “spiritual” towers. So, in that same year, I added an upper story to this section, which represents myself, or my egopersonality. I had started the first tower in 1923, two months after the death of my mother. These two dates are meaningful because the tower, as we shall see, is connected with the dead.

At Bollingen, I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. Here I am, as it were, the “age-old son of the mother.” That is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the “old man,” “the ancient,” whom I had already experienced as a child, is personality No. 2, who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.”

C. G. Jung, 1961

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (paperback, p. 225).

“There are no other similar beings like man that are articulate and could give account of their functioning.”

C. G. Jung

“Man’s relation to God probably has to unergo a certain important change: instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child’s prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with God. His goodness means grace and light and His dark side, the terrible temptation of power.

Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet.

Let us hope that God’s good spirit will guide him in his decisions because it will depend upon man’s decision whether God’s creation will continue.

Nothing shows more drastically than this possibility how much of divine power has come within the reach of man.”

C. G. Jung, 1956

Letters, Vol. II, p. 316