Dark Light of the Soul - Softcover

Kathryn Wood Madden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1584200650 ISBN 13: 9781584200659

Publisher: Lindisfarne Books, 2008

Synopsis

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.

“If, as I contend, a unitary reality underlies all psychological experience, then as clinicians we ignore the ‘spiritual realm and the divine’ at the risk of the total psychic health of those in our care” ―Kathryn Madden

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.

CHAPTERS:

1. Unitary Reality
2. Distinctions between Psychology and Religion
3. Radical Otherness
4. Jung and the Pleroma
5. When Deep Calls unto Deep
6. The Self: Uniting Opposites
7. Meeting Clinical Otherness
8. Trauma, Dreams, and Resistance to Otherness
9. Soul Retrieval: The Lonely One
10. Through the Air Hole

About this title

About the Author:

Kathryn Madden, Ph.D., licensed psychoanalyst and Diplomate, AAPC, has served the past ten years at the Blanton-Peale Institute in New York City, first as Academic Dean and teaching faculty, and then as President & CEO. Kathryn received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary. She is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Psychology & Religion, (Springer 2009), senior editor of Quadrant: Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Religion & Health: Psychology, Spirituality & Medicine. Kathryn lectures regularly at national and international conferences on the subject of depth psychology and teaches courses on the Symbolic Nature of the Psyche and the Spiritual Dimensions of Clinical Practice. She maintains a clinical practice in New York City. Visit her website at www.therapywithsoul.com.

Review:

“An eclipse is a symbol of a blackout, an abyss, a void state, a darkening, an abandonment, a cessation...a cutting off of the light, a throwing into shade. It is a journey to the unseen, the hidden, the unknown, what Madden calls ‘the distance of dazzling darkness.’ Madden is interested in transformation...to chart a spiritual path for the age...and the metamorphosis of the culture at large. Madden is our realigning spiritual chiropractor...she scratches the earth for images of a sleeping giantess, a heroine who will give us the symbol...the myth the age needs...to kick-start psychic metamorphosis. Madden depicts Jung’s spiraling into the vortex of the collective unconscious....
    “Here, she compares Jung’s creative illness to the shaman who is fated to endure a period away from [human company], to live in a torturous prison, teeming with visions, whose later return benefits a society cutoff from the very area of the psyche that the shaman has reopened and made accessible. Symbols, myths, and metaphors arise from this hidden place, symbols whose incorporation in the culture are the very agents of cultural transformation. Madden ‘defines soul as the heart or essence of the person endowed with the potential for a conscious relationship in Deity.’... And these metaphors that she employs!...’ enfleshed soul,’ ‘guts of the soul,’...‘the inner world is also the flesh of the outer world,...a flesh transformed.’ Like Jung, she has something of the poet in her. Madden directs us ‘to a deeper understanding of life, to a level where the ego is not in control, but perhaps is perched on the limbs of a tree staring into the void at the rising star of the self-same Self.’ This book is a symphony that some good teacher should conduct, constructing a course from the book’s contents. Dark Light of the Soul deserves a hearing.” ―Craig Cansfield, (from a review in the Journal of Religion and Health: Psychology, Spirituality & Medicine, 49:3,2010)

Dark Light of the Soul will make a profound contribution to the history of Western spirituality.” ―Ewert H. Cousins, Professor Emeritus, Fordham University, Chief Editorial Consultant for The Classics of Western Spirituality

“In this beautifully crafted book, Kathryn Madden shows how traumatic breakdown may turn out to be the first step in a psychological/spiritual breakthrough to a deeper “unitary reality” that supports us all. By exploring the breakthrough experiences of C. G. Jung, Jacob Boehme, and her own clinical cases, she shows how psychotherapeutically mediated contact with this “ground of being” (both immanent and transcendent) can make all the difference in the healing of trauma.” ―Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., author of The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit (Routledge, 1996).

“Readers will be grateful to Kathryn Madden for her clear discussion of Jung”s and Boehme”s experiences of and reflections on the nature of unitary reality. Her clinical insight and spiritual response to the otherness that addresses us from this depth, brings light to the life of our souls.” ―Ann Belford Ulanov, Ph.D., Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion, Union Theological Seminary; psychoanalyst in private practice, and author of The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness/Deadness in the Self (Abingdon Press, 2007)

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About this edition

• Publisher: Lindisfarne Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1584200650
• ISBN 13: 9781584200659
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272