Book Description

"In an age focused increasingly upon a cultural, political, and social understanding of otherness as diversity, preferring to ponder God, if at all, mostly in terms of immanence, depth psychology is in danger of becoming breadth psychology. The search for transcendence has become more and more the province of New Age weekend workshops. On the other hand, depth psychology that seeks only the transpersonal without the incarnate spirit in the flesh of everyday relationships in history may likewise prove to be a failed enterprise.... In this work, I compare and contrast Boehme's and Jung's experiences with a special focus on the religious or psychological experience of what Erich Neumann calls unitary reality, a ground of being that contains all opposites in potentiality" (from the book) Dark Light of the Soul explores the inner journeys of Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century Protestant mystic, and C.G. Jung, the twentieth-century depth psychologist. Each was concerned with the immediacy of experience, yet comprehended the importance of spirit as a transforming presence in human life. Kathryn Wood Madden connects the experiences of these two pioneers, focusing on a "ground of being that contains all opposites in potentiality." She examines those experiences from the perspective of depth psychology and religion, offering meaningful insights for anyone on a path of inner development, as well as for professionals in clinical settings. Dark Light of the Soul will be of interest to all therapeutic clinicians and anyone who wishes a deeper understanding of and fresh paths into the human psyche. "Because so much tension exists in the world in the way each of us apprehends the divine, we sorely need a way of working with our psyches; this is imperative, in fact, to human existence and survival in the face of terrorism, fundamentalism, and archetypal evil. We need to locate and work within a psycho-spiritual umbrella that is large enough to house contradictions." (from the book)