M. Esther Harding was born August 5, 1888, in England. She took her M.D. in 1914 at the University of London. After training with Jung, she began her analytical practice in New York in 1923 and became a leading pioneer of Jungian psychology in this country. Upon the conclusion of a long-awaited trip to visit Bollingen, Greece, and her family in Shropshire, she died in May of 1971. The records of these conversations were found among her papers after her death. What is here published has been selected by Edward F. Edinger, to whom she left her papers, and has been taken verbatim from those records, except for minor grammatical corrections.
Confessions of an Extravert — Thayer A. Green
In my fourteen years of attending Jungian gatherings I cannot remember ever hearing a lecture on extraversion. I cannot even remember reading about one. Perhaps it is my own predominant extraversion that gives me the courage, or the foolishness, to venture the subject — but it also gives me the (perhaps) illuminating perspective of a minority group member in the predominantly introverted Jungian professional community. …
The Meaning of Consciousness — Edward F. Edinger
The goal of psychotherapy, indeed of all modes of psychological development, is the maximum degree of consciousness. Consciousness and all it signifies is the ultimate value. But what does it signify? Do we really know what we mean when we use the word? …
Parapsychic Luminosities — Edward H. Russell
What I have to discuss here, the perception of parapsychic luminous phenomena, is at this point a subjective confession, bounded by personal experience. There is certainly no lack of historical references to similar phenomena. And today, although I have yet to find descriptions that connect convincingly, the recently rising interest and the sheer volume of available material have led me to believe that the incidence of such phenomena is greater than one might expect. …
Jung and Rhine — William Sloane
A letter written by William Sloane to his father. Sloan was present at a meeting in October of 1937 at which J. B. Rhine, the pioneer in experimental ESP research, and Jung, first met. This letter describes that meeting.
… It was exciting to watch Jung and Rhine together, and to contrast their greatnesses — Jung the cosmopolite, the man of enormous erudition, the old man, wise, and too simple and direct to be either a braggart or a [shrinking] violet. Rhine, on the other hand, is a man whom only America could have produced — quiet, low-spoken, intense, with that slow-burning fuse of humor innate in his speech, gravely deferential to Jung, putting his problems before Jung without any plea for help, any servility, any expectation of praise, with the obvious feeling that the problem of man and his nature was so sacrosanct and vital a one that Jung was obligated to help him, as he was to tell Jung what he knew. …
The Age of Androgyny — June Singer
My consulting room provides a window to the world through which I see two growing tendencies among women and men today. The first I perceive as an attempt to obliterate the cultural and sociological differences between masculine and feminine functioning in the workaday world. This I call the tendency toward androgyny. The second tendency appears as a resistance against the first! One part of the population seems intent upon achieving (in Jungian terms) as complete an integration of the anima and animus as possible, by educating people away from stereotypical sex attitudes and by providing equal opportunity and responsibility for both sexes in all areas. The other part of the population seems intent upon thwarting this integration by insisting upon the essential differences between male and female consciousness and upon the necessity to conform attitudes and behavior to these differences. …
To Kill Mercutio: Thoughts on Shakespeare’s Psychological Development — John Boe
The image of Shakespeare as the poet of Nature accords with Jung’s view of Shakespeare’s art as an expression of the unconscious, “unclouded by ego elements.” But Shakespeare does not seem to have been always at one with his nature, nor always at home with the unconscious.
From the characters he created, starting with a consideration of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, we can imagine the broad issues of Shakespeare’s psychological development. …
The Golem: An Image of Governing Synchronicity — Arnold Mindell
… I have observed that synchronicities in psychosis sometimes display a particular pattern. The psychotic identifies his ego with God and feels that he enslaves his environment. Also he feels that his environment is manipulated by creative/destructive daemons, and he lives in the fear that they will turn and destroy him. It is this image of man as an omnipotent creator, threatened by his own magical creations. All synchronicities do not, of course, possess this character; we have no complete differentiated pattern of such phenomena. But some do, and a study of this particular recurrent image can help us understand at least one governing image behind synchronicities in psychotic states. …
What Does Analytical Psychology Offer Those with No Access to Analysis? — Vernon E. Brooks
…“What can I get out of analytical psychology if there is no Jungian analyst in my neighborhood? — or if there is one but I can’t afford to pay what analysis costs?”
That isn’t so easy to answer. I think some attempt at an answer is needed, however, because it is a legitimate question, it’s a serious question, and — I suspect, from the frequency with which it occurs — an important one for many people. In order to answer it, I think we ought to consider briefly what analytic psychology is — what its basic realities are — and then how these realities might become a conscious part of the experiences of an individual who cannot take advantage of analysis. …