Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book

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Lastly I would say it is a somewhat inward-looking series of conversations which we are given, the reader is somewhat left outside of the internal signification of the dialogue, and as such unable to really assimilate it into any wider contexts of understanding. The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows. Eisler’s method is significantly interrelational and systemic, it supersedes traditional binary oppositions and offers an interesting correlation with alchemy. I don't believe it is necessary to get something out of this book without, as in my case, having read the Red Book.

Lament of the Dead is a fascinating read not because it tells us exactly what to do with the dead, or even what they are.

Then I read these conversations between Shamdasani and Hillman, and it reflected back to me the appropriateness of my own insights. I feel that experiential and brain based medicine techniques like brainspotting are the future of the profession.

He has case studies encouraging patients to resume Christian or Muslim religious practices as a source of healing and integration. Instead of viewing the religious traditions and prescriptive lists of rules or literal truths he asked patients to view them as metaphors for self discovery and processes for introspection. Campbell, and American post jungians in general were not alway great attributing influences and credit where it was due. He sees something in the Red Book that he allows to clarify his earlier attempt to revision psychology.

Shamdasani has deftly avoided the fads, misappropriations and superficialization that have plagued the Jungian school of thought for decades. From this dramatic but poorly developed restatement of Jungian mysticism, the authors proceed through sketchy, meandering discussions that touch on Jung’s testy relationship with Christianity, the obscurantism of latter-day Jungian analysts, and the need to infuse the Red Book’s literary, humanistic approach into psychology’s current scientistic model.

Written in a similar voice to the King James Bible, The Red Book has a religious and transcendent quality. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. The Red Book represents a proto Jungian psychology as Jung attempted to discover techniques for integration.The philosophical dialectic turns the conversation into an extended metaphor that indirectly supports the themes of the text. I would recommend these two volumes to anyone in pursuit of or interested in psychology, philosophy, psychology, and even sociology. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury…Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all one. The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ. In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art.