Quadrant: The Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation
The Narcissus myth is an image of psychic existence that is between the polarities personal and archetypal, partaking of each and being separate from neither. Narcissus is a transitional figure, representing the pattern of existence in transit towards or from archetypal reality, clinging to the archetypal world or straining to separate from it, scorning personal relationships that would separate from the eternal, and equally rejecting the otherness of the divine realm which would place him closer to the human. …
Narcissism and the Search for Interiority — Donald Kalsched
Jung once said that the gods have become diseases, and perhaps nowhere in contemporary Western culture is the truth of this statement better illustrated than in the case of the mythological Narcissus. The handsome youth immortalized in Ovid's Metamorphoses has lent his name to an evolving list of psychological and sociological “pathologies” in our time beginning with Freud's early use of the name in his classic paper On Narcissism (1914). Narcissus has not fared too well in these descriptions. Contemporary psychiatry, for example, has recently adopted his name to designate a specific type of personality disorder in which “a grandiose sense of self, exhibitionism,” and “severely disturbed object-relationships” are the predominant symptoms. …
… But the exclusive attention devoted recently to the psychopathology of narcissism runs the risk of neglecting or obscuring the deeper individuation-urge embedded in this frustrating disorder and the wider relevance of the narcissist's suffering and disillusionment to the conundrums of relatedness in our time where the “inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love” seems an increasingly prevalent problem. For this wider perspective we must reach back to the myth itself and examine the plight of the mythological Narcissus in light of recent psychoanalytic findings. …
Puer Aeternus: The Narcissistic Relation to the Self — Jeffrey Satinover
For some twenty years the problem of the puer aeternus — the eternal adolescent — has been of growing interest and puzzlement to Jungian analysts. Interest in the puer [for convenience the term is being applied to both the man and woman] has grown in proportion to a striking increase in the incidence of this kind of personality: a personality characterized on the one hand by a poor adjustment to quotidian demands, a failure to set stable goals and to make lasting achievements in accord with these goals, and a proclivity for intense but short-lived romantic attachments, yet, on the other hand, it is also characterized by noble idealism, a fertile imagination, spiritual insight and frequently, too, by remarkable talent. …
Reassessing Femininity and Masculinity: A Critique of Some Traditional Assumptions — Edward C. Whitmont
During the early thirties, Jung made an initial attempt at what he then called a preliminary characterization of the female and male predispositions. He termed Eros the tendency to relatedness, which he deemed fundamentally expressive of the feminine; Logos, spirit, creative and ordering intelligence, and meaning typified the male attitude. Unfortunately, this first preliminary attempt has been treated in much Jungian literature as though it were the final word for the intervening forty years. Unfortunately, because, in the light of women's increasing awareness of themselves, more and more evidence has been accumulating that the Eros-Logos concept is inadequate for covering the wide range of feminine and masculine dynamics. Moreover, it is also terminologically and psychologically inappropriate. …
Book Reviews
Applied Dream Analysis: A Jungian Approach— Mary Ann Mattoon. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 1978. Reviewed by Adolf N. Ammann
Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav— Arthur Green. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. 1979. Reviewed by James Kirsch
Puer Papers— James Hillman, et. al. Irving, Texas: Spring Publications. 1979. Reviewed by James A. Hall.
Creative Man: Five Essays— Erich Neumann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bollingen Series LXI:2. 1979. Reviewed by Jonathan J. Goldberg.
Alchemical Active Imagination— Marie-Louise von Franz. Irving, Texas: Spring Publications. 1979. Reviewed by V. Walter Odajnyk.
The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics— Gary Zukav. New York: William Morrow & Company. 1979. Reviewed by Zulette M. Catir.
The Flight To Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy— Harold Bloom. New York: Vintage Books. 1980. Reviewed by Thomas H. Records.
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