Reviewed by Maureen Murdock

Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience is a fascinating book with many layers of meaning. It can be read as a memoir of a brilliant scholar, experiencing a life- threatening injury to her brain, who sustained such brokenness of the heart and body that all the theories about the suffering of the soul suddenly appear in a different light, as well as a beautifully written dialogue between philosophy and depth psychology. Paris asks the questions: What is truly alive and what is outdated in the field of depth psychology? What ideas are fresh and which ones have the potential to harm us even more?

Maureen Murdock is a depth psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco and was Core Faculty in the MA Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of the best-selling book, The Heroine’s Journey, as well as the newly revised Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind; Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children; and The Heroine’s Journey Workbook. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages.

Paris uses her extensive background in philosophy, mythology, and the humanities as well as her expertise as a clinician to explore the realms of depth psychology and how it evokes in us a desire to think deeply about the life of the psyche. The richness of her ideas, as well as the elegance of her style, make this book an essential reference for every student of depth psychology, particularly for psychotherapists and those beginning clinical practice.

Paris redefines the goal of psychotherapy by giving the reader a taste of the awe-inspiring mysteries of life and how the present models of psychotherapy (medical, financial, and redemptive) work against this ability to find a deeper meaning in life. I was especially appreciative of her differentiation of the concept of redemption with that of individuation. She asks the reader to look at how the myth of redemption, which derives from a monotheistic mythology, informs the goals of the therapeutic process. The client starts therapy “in pursuit of consciousness, but covertly the process can conceal a quest for redemption” in which he believes he will ultimately get rid of his internal monsters, change his behavior, and evolve into an enlightened being with flawless psychological health. (p.54) Paris’ atheistic understanding of Jung’s approach offers a much needed alternative to faith. “Instead of prayer, active imagination; instead of redemption, individuation; instead of belief, the archetypal images of gods and goddesses.” (p. 95)

Paris uses potent examples from her clinical practice to demonstrate how to help the patient examine both the facts and affect of his personal story or myth. As the patient recalls a particular life situation, he becomes more conscious of how he has interpreted it, created a particular version of the story, and shaped the plot with a certain archetypal inflection. Naming the oppressive myth allows the beginning of its dismantling, forcing it into the open for examination and scrutiny. Paris reminds us that a myth working in the background becomes invisible; one thinks it is a personal choice, but it is not. The goal of depth psychotherapy is to become aware of the reigning myth and discover how it shapes the patient by expanding or contracting his being.

Her approach is both theoretical and practical: She listens carefully to the images and symbols in her patient’s tale and emphasizes why it is crucial to remain centered on the imagination of the patient. She cautions against instances in which the therapist exerts too much influence, interpreting the images, with the result that the patient ends up with a story that reflects the therapist’s imagination or theoretical orientation. She writes, “The goal of depth psychology is to evoke: to bring to mind a memory or feeling, to provoke a particular reaction or feeling, to make beings appear who are normally invisible.”(p.80)

I particularly valued her deconstruction of the prevailing maternal and paternal myths in our culture. Paris writes that the individual mother is still the focus of blame in therapy, diverting attention away from the collective maternal responsibility of our cultural, political, and educational institutions. She calls for a revisioning of the maternal myth—a revolution in values, manners, education, aesthetic sensitivity, city planning, and welfare programs. She examines how the mother archetype has been used to keep women powerless in the role of mother and to keep certain adults infantile. She writes, “We come into the world with our mother, but we die alone. Between these two events, the infantile illusion of safety must thin out until the child is strong enough to bear the responsibility of his or her decisions.” (p.115)

What defines an adult psyche is not independence from a need for compassion and protection but a basic orientation toward achieving responsibility. She quotes Sartre: “To be free, one must be responsible for oneself.” (p.100)

This is where the paternal principle comes in. Her description of the Father archetype is a much needed act of re-balancing the archetype of Mother with that of the Father. She gives value to the will to win, self-discipline, a fascination for strategy and tactics, a willingness to face conflict, a love of victory, a desire for power, and a capacity to take risks.

One of Paris’s greatest contributions in Wisdom of the Psyche is to warn against bringing too much Great Mother nurturance into therapy. When a patient expresses a need or a wound, it is tempting to take on the maternal role and give the support that seems to be lacking. She cautions the beginning therapist, in particular, to avoid psychological coddling and encourages her instead to bring in the paternal principle to help the patient develop responsibility. Pouring too much maternal love into the therapeutic container deludes the patient into expecting such positive attention in every subsequent relationship. “Too much sweet attention and support breeds an intense neediness that is at the core of egotism.” (p. 152)

Wisdom of the Psyche has the power to encourage one to participate in “amor fati,” the love of one’s fate, to endure the absurd, to cope with the insufferable, to lose one’s innocence, and to embrace the totality of one’s story as it unfolds, as Paris herself did in re-envisioning her own “knock on the head.” A brilliant look at how the field of depth psychology is enlarging our consciousness.

Maureen Murdock is a depth psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco and was Core Faculty in the MA Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of the best-selling book, The Heroine’s Journey, as well as the newly revised Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind; Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children; and The Heroine’s Journey Workbook. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages.

Reviewed by Brad VanWagenen Ph.D.c.

After reading it, I understood why James Hillman endorses it with the following comment: "emotionally personal, immediately useful, surprisingly original, beautifully deep, this page-turning read also turns the page into a new century of psychology. What an achievement!" Yes indeed. The author and New York analyst, Michael Vannoy Adams thinks of Ginette Paris as "the most original and eloquent of all writers on contemporary depth psychology" while the English Jungian scholar and author, Susan Rowland, thinks this the "bright book of the future for everyone involved with depth psychology"! What commands so much enthusiasm?

As a person with nearly 20 years of experience in the Pharmaceutical industry (working in Neuroscience) and developing interests in depth-psychology, I was intrigued by the title of Ginette Paris’ latest book: The Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience. Her book, however, contained very little on “Neuroscience.” It does however, contain a great deal on a variety of topics relative to depth psychology. Paris asks an important question; what is the future of depth psychology, given the takeover from neuroscience and pharmacology? She answers that question by stepping back from the medical and psychodynamic models to engage the subject mater at an archetypal level relayed through her own personal and traumatic confrontation with death, the unconscious, and her recovery.

The author's personal experience is supported by a number of case histories from her practice. Paris takes a bold stance, stating that depth psychology is not to be lumped in with the sciences. While the field of depth psychology was discovered by scientists, taking a scientific approach, depth psychology is not a science. Thank You Dr. Paris! Depth psychology is not a science because its subject matter, the psyche, is not amenable to reduction; psyche is not reproducible, verifiable, or willing to be contained, defined or restricted at any level. The field of depth psychology is closer to that of the humanities, where key to working with psyche is an ever evolving dynamic imagination. In reality depth psychology fits neither in the sciences or the humanities; it is In-Between, just as its fundamental intrinsic nature is In-Between.

While I enjoyed all of Paris’ book, I found her last chapter entitled “Joy: The Antidote to Anxiety” the most important for our society. Paris draws an important distinction between “fear” and “anxiety.” While “fear” has an object, “anxiety” does not; the object of our anxiety is “hidden.” Our society is a society suffering from anxiety (I would call it chronic, low-grade stress). Regardless of the terminology, anxiety shuts a person down and, I believe, suppresses the immune system resulting in an entire host of medical conditions that I as a neuroscientist have worked to develop drugs for (e.g., anxiety and depression). The role of anxiety in other disease states (e.g., cancer, heart disease, obesity, etc.), for which neuroscience does not concern itself, should not be overlooked. While anxiety shuts a person down and suppresses the immune system, fear calls for action (and, I believe, stimulates the immune system), flight or fight being the two basic instincts of survival.

A millennia of evolution has provided our species with mechanisms for dealing with fear. We, however, do not seem to have developed an evolutionary response to anxiety. Paris addresses the problem of anxiety from the position of depth psychology, stating that, “anxiety comes with the loss of images.” Paris tells us that, in our culture, we have replaced images with concepts and fear with anxiety. Our culture has worked very hard to free itself of oppressive mythologies, but unfortunately has distanced itself from the imagination that created those mythologies.

The loss of imagination, necessary for the creation of vital invigorating mythologies (both collective and personal) is trauma for the psyche and disease for the body. Paris points out that it takes a healthy imagination––an artistic compromise––to balance the requirements of the ego with the orientation of the Self. Paris reminds us that this balancing (i.e., Individuation) is similar to what the Greeks would have called the lifelong quest for harmony.

On a more personal note, I found, Paris’ work as a valuable guide on my own journey of self-discovery. Of particular value, were the weaving of her own personal account and those of her clients into her discussion on the archetype of the Mother and the archetype of the Father. I feel that I would have saved a great deal of time (and money) had I had this information available to me during my own therapeutic process. I am not saying this book is or should be a replacement for “therapy.” It is, however, a valuable aid in the therapeutic process and for anyone on their inner journey of discovery.

Reviewed by Jan Bauer, published in the Journal of the Jung association of Montreal (November 07)

This is a ‘heady’ book – heady in at least three ways. It is an extremely intelligent analysis and critique of the field of psychology today, both within and without academia. In this it succeeds in what Paris announces as one of her goals in the Preface: “to make a critique of my field, an inventory of what is useful and what is dead.”

But it is also ‘heady’ in the sense that it is full of brilliant, often poetic, nuggets of wisdom and insight that both startle and satisfy the reader eager for new or original ways to envision psychological reality. For example:

“The pursuit of consciousness, of wisdom – even of happiness – is the opposite of treatment.” ‘The psyche is, above all, complex. It dances with history, evolves or regresses according to the evolution of culture.” “Despotism, tyranny and revolution, fundamentalism, heresies, triangles, alliances and betrayals, all the causes of war have their parallel in family life where psychic combat is a daily occurrence. A normal family does not exist.ˆ (Italics mine)

Finally, Wisdom of the Psyche is heady because the author gives many examples, especially from her own life, of psychological experiences that both move and inspire the reader. This fulfills what she announces as her second goal, which to take “ordinary experiences of inferiority, brokenness, failure and pain and to test the (psychological) theories against my own experiences of suffering.”

The first chapter, “Denting my Thick Skull,” in which she describes her nearly fatal backwards fall into a dry swimming pool and the time spent in intensive care and the parallel stories of outer medical care and inner psychological voyage, is just simply stunning. We feel we are in the IC bed with her as the cold nurse who reminds her of her own rejecting mother alternates with inner butterflies and bulls and compassionate Great Mother who together create an alternate, and ultimately more healing energy.

I think this chapter illustrates better than anything else in the book what she set out to do, i.e. to show the importance of image and myth and inner voyages in bringing life back to what she calls today’s “unhappy souls who suffer what we could call emotional hypothermia.” (See what I mean by nuggets?) Again and again she will return to the themes of imagination and myth-making, saying depth psychology belongs not to science but to the humanities and the arts. Some examples of ‘nuggets’ that I think capture this message well:

“Defining abnormalities belongs to the medical profession and to neuroscience whereas defining normality depends on the power of one myth over another.”

“The medical model is inadequate to make sense of the agony and the ecstasy of our life because the tragic, comic, epic and lyric genres are inherent in the human narrative. Artists, not doctors, give us the words and images to become conscious of when and how we suffer and when and how we rejoice.”

It almost seemed to me that the book was written by two people. (And perhaps that would fit with the author’s own ideas on the multiplicity of the psyche) One is an intellectual with a formidable ability to present and deconstruct the myriad conceptions and myths that mainstream psychologies and therapies maintain about themselves. The other is an empathetic psychologist who gives excellent, vivid examples from her patients’ and her own life to show why the conventional psychological attitudes fall short.

Looking at the intellectual track, we find that chapters 3-6 are all mainly critiques of common attitudes. We have “Therapy as Cure: the Medical Model,” “Therapy as Investment, the Economic Model,” “Therapy as Plea, the Legal Model,” and “Therapy as Redemption.” In each of these chapters the ‘as’ is presented and then deconstructed in favor of soul-making, imagination, quality of life as opposed to ’victimology’ or ‘ego pursuit of happiness’ or ‘who owes what to whom.’

Other chapters also begin with a critique, this time of the way the Child, Mother and Father archetype are used and misused in our general collective thinking. How one-sided they are towards over-maternal, unconditional, coddling attitudes that neither respect the true wholeness of the Mother archetype or the need for much more Father presence in the form of leadership, of conditional love that requires self-control, discipline and achievement. It would be impossible, for me anyway, to argue with this content and basic critique. They are presented thoroughly and deconstructed skillfully. Her passionate plea for a less rigid, more truly psychological attitude, expresses itself in touching examples as well.

Still, there are some aspects of Paris’s critical texts in these chapters that seem to me rather jarring and judgmental generalizations. For example, in a section subtitled, “avoiding neurotic contacts,” she says that in order to know what love is we need to know what it is not. Fine. But the way she says it – “We know with more certainly what it is not … somebody on the via negativa is able to smell the destruction of worn-out psychological patterns,” – implies too much ego certainty. As if anyone who wanted could simply follow, ‘with certainty,’ the path to avoidance of neurotic contacts. This statement stands out in her actual text as a little glib because it is not qualified at all, by, for example, “anyone who has worked long and hard at understanding themselves …” Even if it were, it still implies a fairly straightforward gymnastic while, in fact, I don’t know anyone at all who is able to avoid neurotic contacts in their lives!

There seemed to me some glibness too in, for example, a tendency to take for granted strong ego control and will when discussing neurosis. “Being neurotic is like a bad habit that wastes what life has to offer ... the ordinary neurotic personality is like somebody who possesses a colossal fortune and worries every day when the Dow Jones index goes down a few points.” Again, there is no qualifier here. It jarred this reader and came off, ironically, as an intellectual dismissal of all the very real suffering and complexity of any neurotic individual, once again seeming to imply that such a condition is mostly chosen and consciously maintained.

The same attitude emerged in a short discussion of narcissism in which she describes the narcissism of an individual as a kind of undesirable self-centeredness that simply needs to be addressed directly ( “Narcissus, who put you in charge?”), to be transformed into a more satisfying and joyous quality of life. Would that things were so simple.

Then, when addressing the meaning of love and how difficult it is to define, she points out, for example, that a child cannot show love, only need, which is proven by the fact that its affections will quickly change from parent to another good enough caregiver. Again, there is surely a lot of truth here but the terse, unmodified way in which it is said seemed too reductive and categorical. In holding a sustained critical stance such as hers in these chapters, the writer risks hitting all subjects, regardless of their complexity, with the same abrasive Brillo pad.

Finally, in her discussion of Therapy as Redemption, the author clearly and openly states she is agnostic and glad to be so. Let me quote from these important statements:

My generation is perhaps the first in history to have been so freely agnostic, without the risk of being shunned, condemned, tortured or burned at the stake ... The God-image or God principle, this beyond the ego realm of the archetype, is truly different from traditional religion faith. It does not demand the kind of obedience that traditional religions have tried (and are still trying) to impose. It is a radical move away from a posture of belief (p. 67).

She is, she says, however, also spiritual, and she talks of how important it is for her to find spiritual values in other sources such as Greek mythology and other simply human values that transcend ego reality and purpose.

In spite of the qualifiers, I still could not help but feel a subtle judgment about those who might still be naive or needy enough to need to ‘believe’ or have ‘faith’ in a traditional religious outlook. Also, I couldn’t help having a feeling of real disconnect between what she relishes as her personal agnostic freedom and the simultaneous, but not mentioned fact, that American religiosity has been increasing exponentially.

Yet, outside of the sense of judgment and disconnect that this reader did experience, it must be said that Paris is still superb in her deconstruction of the effects of a rigid orthodox religious position.

What I found may jar but this does not lessen the fullness and true wisdom that is in this book and the nuggets that are far too numerous to mention but remain in the mind long after the book is closed.

The last chapters of the book which concern myth-making and soul in the world confirm this richness. As she leaves the grids of criticism, the ‘via negativa’ and enters the area she loves, a ‘via positiva’, Paris really soars. She has some wonderful passages on ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in the world at large, on our need and ability to keep revising our own myths, on the difference between fear and anxiety, and how image and imagination can help to free us from anxiety.

As for the psychologist – the other writer of the book – she provides, throughout the book, very apt and moving examples of real peoples’ lives to illustrate the difference between what conventional psychology would make of us and how depth psychology can both enrichen and deepen our lives.

To conclude, Wisdom of the Psyche is not an easy book. But it is rich, intelligent and honest and should be read at least twice to appreciate its richness or, if not twice, then slowly. It is a book that rewards the reader with a huge store of knowledge, psychological history, challenges to both intellect and feeling and, most of all, lots of wonderful metaphors and imagination to chew on.

–Jan Bauer