Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience

In the quest for identity and healing, what belongs to the humanities and what to clinical psychology? Ginette Paris uses cogent and passionate argument as well as stories from patients to teach us to accept that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. This is very hard to accept which is why, so often, the body has the painful and dispiriting job of showing us what our psyche refuses to see. In jargon-free language, the author describes her own story of taking a turn downwards and inwards in the search for a metaphorical personal 'death'. If this kind of mortality is not attended to, then more literal bodily ailments and actual death itself can result. Paris engages with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. At present, she demonstrates, what is happening is damaging to both science and imagination.

Table of Contents:
Preface. Introduction. Denting My Thick Skull. A Fable: Mom, Dad, and Me, Me, Me. Therapy as Cure: The Medical Model. Therapy as Investment: The Economic Model. Therapy as Plea: The Legal Model. Therapy as Redemption. Boundary Issues: "You, Science. Me, Humanities.". Brother Philosophy, Sister Psychology. The Archetype of Mother. The Archetype of Father. The Invisibility of the Psyche. The Ultimate Virtual Reality Game. Joy: The Antidote to Anxiety. Schools of Thought are Families. Bibliography

About the Author :
Ginette Paris is a psychologist, therapist and writer. She teaches Archetypal and Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. Her books include Pagan Meditations, and Pagan Grace. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Mythological Studies

Review :
"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, University of Greenwich, UK "Every once in a rare while a book comes into one's hands that is so satisfying that it's hard to write about it without drenching every sentence in superlatives. This is such a book!Paris's jargon-free language invites us to look into the widows of her agile mind without making us feel intrusive. She writes personally but not confessionally, is empathic but not dogmatic in her positions, and speaks to us with controlled passion and dry, sparkling wit." -- Lyn Cowan, International Association of Jungian Studies Review "In this account of her encounter with her own shadow side through recovery from a brain injury. She points out that what the psyche does not make conscious, the body will." - Jacqueline A. Carleton, EABP Newsletter