Published Books

Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience

"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."
James Hillman, former Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich

"Once again Ginette Paris demonstrates that she is quite simply the most original and eloquent of all writers on contemporary depth psychology. This book is a brilliant and beautiful account of how a serious accident, a near-fatal brain injury, became not just a trauma but a rare and wonderful opportunity. After the concussion and coma, Paris did not just regain consciousness. She experienced a life-altering transformation that led her to delve below all the gray matter of the current, trendy fascination with neuroscience to explore the "deep psyche." In this book Paris invents an entirely new genre of psychological writing, one that combines intimately personal autobiography, humanely inspirational stories from patients, and radically imaginative theoretical proposals for the future of depth psychology."
Michael Vannoy Adams, Jungian Psychoanalyst

"Wisdom of the Psyche is the bright book of the future for everyone involved with depth psychology and its creative transformation of the arts and sciences. Ginette Paris's stunning achievement is to combine autobiography, history of ideas, clinical originality, psychological theory and philosophical sophistication with the arts of a poet and novelist. Her book is at once lucid, erudite, a delightful companion, and a serious challenge to the academy and the consulting room. Paris gently and powerfully embeds depth psychology in the humanities, making Wisdom of the Psyche essential reading for the twenty-first century. We are all the richer for it."
Susan Rowland, Reader in English and Jungian Studies, University of Greenwich, UK

» Review by Harvey L. Shepherd, Co-President, Jung Society of Montreal, Canada

» Review by Maureen Murdock, author of The Heroine’s Journey, Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind, Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory

» Review by Jan Bauer, author of Impossible Love: Or Why the Heart Must Go Wrong

» Review by Brad Van Wagenen

The Psychology of Abortion

Excerpt from Ginette Paris's Introduction:

I have drawn inspiration throughout this book from a guiding image, the Artemis of Greek mythology (known to the Romans as Diana). She is an untamed goddess, a champion of what we would think of today as ecological values.

I have chosen her to enrich these reflections on abortion because her myth is full of what appear to be contradictory elements, the same kinds of contradictions that abound in considerations of abortion. Artemis is both a protector of wild animals and a hunter who kills them with unerring aim. How can the same divinity be the patron saint of hunters and the protector of animals?

Greek women invoked her name during the pains of labor, but if a woman were to die or the infant could not survive, then a quick death, considered preferable in Greek eyes to a long agony or a life of suffering, was also attributed to Artemis.

The same goddess thus offers both protection and death to women, children, and animals. Why these contradictions? Why are they personified in a feminine divinity? Is it a way of saying that a woman's protective power cannot function properly if she does not also possess full power, namely the power over death as well as life?

Her image belongs to us as well as to antiquity because, like all fundamental images of the human experience, which C.G. Jung called "archetypes," she never really ages but reappears in different forms and different symbols. So we may ask ourselves what is happening today to this archetype that combines in such a paradoxical way the love of life and the acceptance of death. She encourages us to become more aware of the power of death, its inescapable nature, and its necessary role in a living ecology.

Abortion is about love, life, and death.

This book develops the idea that abortion is a sacred act, that it is an expression of maternal responsibility and not a failure of maternal love. If the issues surrounding life and death and children and love are not religious issues, or at least spiritual ones, what is left that is religious? But if we accept abortion as a religious act, then many questions arise. What sort of religion do we mean? Who defines it? What values does it represent?

Judeo-Christian values, which may have seemed necessary, perhaps even redemptive, some 2,000 years ago, now appear more and more irresponsible, and I will try to show how they are infinitely more cruel than abortion. What is a moral stand on reproduction worth if it doesn't take responsibility for the children born of a religious duty? What kind of a pope (el Papa in Italian) invests in Wall Street instead of providing for the hungry and destitute? What kind of fundamentalist morality turns its back on the suffering of mothers and couples and children when babies arrive unwanted in the world? And, above all, can we accept any kind of religious morality that has lost sight of the larger implications of a global ecology?

Reviews of Pagan Meditations

An appreciation of three Greek Goddesses as values of importance to our twentieth-century collective life: Aphrodite as civilized sexuality and beauty; Artemis as solitude, ecological significance, and a perspective on abortion; and Hestia as warm hearth, security, and stability. As the author's contribution to imaginative feminism, this book addresses both the meditative interior of each person and the community of culture.

Ginette Paris began her archetypal studies with this book. It has since become a foundation for the study of goddesses and how they imaginatively fit into our lives today.

Reviews of Pagan Grace

The gift of grace, coming to us as beauty, cannot be ordered or owned, only acknowledged and served. When events take on a mythical dimension and reverberate in the soul, then we feel grace.

The three images of divinity amplified in this book express the often unconscious pagan grace present in our daily lives. Dionysos brings joy to celebrations and protects the sexual potency of man. Ginette Paris looks again at soul-making through the body, at the Eleusinian Mysteries in light of the culture's drug and alcohol problems, explores the God's twin faces of liberator and tyrant, and revisions role-playing under Dionysos's aegis.

Lively as mercury, subtle as word play, and as indispensable as commerce or conversation, Hermes' grace is today called communication, involving the necessity of deceit and the seductiveness of rhetoric. His connections with the healing arts provide a sorely needed balance to contemporary medical practice.

Mnemosyne's grace is the remembrance of things past, the details of recollected happiness. The author disentangles the different values of oral memory, literacy, and computer memory, all along allowing Memory's daughters, the Muses, to influence her writing, her feeling, and her thought.

A lively book that continues the work of Pagan Meditations in revivifying individual, cultural, and social life by reawakening their archetypal roots.