The Horned God: Masculine Dynamics of Power and Soul — Sherry L. Salman

The Horned God, an archetypal image of sacred masculine power and protection, provides a symbol with which to reevaluate both modern masculine ego development and feminine animus development. Essentially, the Horned God represents the guardian, healer, and shapeshifter who mediates the world of the objective psyche. He is the elusive, transformative substance of the psyche itself — the adversary and the savior who, with one hand, protects the Mysteries from destructive influences and, with the other, protects the human psyche from contact with what it cannot bear. Encountering him involves a confrontation with the objective psyche and our own limitations, one of the essential tasks of psychotherapy. …

Hephaestus: Model of New-Age Masculinity — Irene Gad

Alienation and despair, estrangement and disillusion, the anxiety and sufferings inherent to the human condition from time immemorial seem to have reached cosmic dimenstions today. The drama of our time concerns the enormous difficulty of finding a new target for our unconquerable need for transcendence of our suffering. Searching the past, we find only the successive failures of previous value systems. Various ideologies have betrayed our collective dreams: religious fervor, national supremacy, industrial affluence, social equality. Reason in its deluded idealism, unconnected to nature, has produced nightmarish monsters haunting our days. Again and again, our nostalgia for the absolute has been the hope of finding the ultimate answer to our longing. …

Aggression: A Jungian Point of View — Richmond K. Greene

A central focus of the therapeutic process is the liberation of aggression out of primitive, self-destructive modes and into a conscious connection with the ego. A major portion of aggression is frequently turned inward in the form of self-hate, or split off from the ego as a part of the “animus” or “shadow.” Furthermore, aggression frequently becomes caught in a complex and acted out in rather ineffective ways whenever that complex happens to be touched. …

While Jung never made a special study of the aggressive instinct per se, his understanding of instinctual libido and its transformation is important to our investigation of aggression. However, before turning to Jung’s contribution, a review of the literature on aggression available to us from other sources is in order. …

Idealization: A Clinical Discrimination — Warren Steinberg

Admiration occurs when we recognize and value qualities in a person that we may not have in ourselves. Our perceptions may lead us further into feelings of inferiority or envy, but the perceptions are nonetheless accurate. Idealization, on the other hand, indicates something extreme and unreal. In this case, our perceptions of and attributions to the other are exaggerated and we may even bestow the coveted qualities of happiness, power, goodness, and omnipotence.

Idealization is a normal occurrence in childhood. It manifests itself in the fantasies of omnipotence which children have about their parents. As development proceeds, these omnipotent feelings are slowly withdrawn and replaced by more realistic perceptions. When this process does not occur, and the earliest forms of idealization continue past their age appropriate phase, idealization becomes pathological. …

Book Reviews

The Oak King, The Holly King, and the Unicorn: The Myths and Symbolism of the Unicorn Tapestries— John Williamson. New York: Harper & Row. 1986. Reviewed by Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo.

The Vertical Labyrinth: Individuation in Jungian Psychology— Aldo Carotenuto. Toronto: Inner City Books. 1985. Reviewed by Ross L. Hainline.

Anima — An Anatomy of a Personified Notion— James Hillman. Dallas: Spring Publications. 1985. Reviewed by Ann Wood Norton.

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth and As Religion— Joseph Campbell. New York: Alfred van der Marck Editions. 1986. Reviewed by John Lobell.

Archetype, Architecture, and The Writer— Bettina L. Knapp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1986. Reviewed by Tayita Hadar.

Jelliffe: American Psychoanalyst and Physician by John C. Burnham and His Correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung— William McGuire, Editor. University of Chicago Press. 1983. Reviewed by Jonathan J. Goldberg.

The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation— Marion Woodman. Toronto: Inner City Books. 1985. Reviewed by Angelyn Spignesi.

[ Return to Top ]