The power of historic influence at work within and through us cannot be overemphasized,

Symbol and metaphor are our greatest gifts, for they make culture and spirituality possible.

only one who is willing to face the pattern of distraction found in his or her addiction, and suffer our common wound more consciously, to really feel what he or she is already feeling, has any hope of growth. A fundamental truth of psychology, from which our ego repeatedly flees, is that it is most commonly through suffering that we are stretched

What does the ego know, and what does it not know? And doesn’t what it does not know play a large role in the conduct of daily life? Again, what is unconscious owns us, and brings the weight of history into our present.

We may choose careers, but we do not choose vocation. Vocation chooses us. To choose what chooses us is a freedom the by-product of which will be a sense of rightness and a harmony within, even if lived out in the world of conflict, absent validation, and at considerable personal cost.

this anxiety must be chosen over depression, for it is developmental, and depression is regressive. Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life; intrapsychic depression is the by-product of our refusal to climb aboard.

The rigor and depth of questions raised by suffering jar us out of complacency, out of the casual reiterations of untroubled life, and bring us to the daily dilemma of enlargement or diminishment.

The tragic sense of life, then, is not morbid but rather heroic, for it is a summons to consciousness, change, and humility before the awesome powers of nature and our own divided psyche. Who ignores this summons will suffer the wrath of the gods, the splitting of the soul we call neurosis.

The “mother” to which he refers was once the literal parent for the child, but for the adult “she” now symbolizes the safe and sheltering harbor: the old job, the familiar warm arms, and the same unchallenged, and stultifying, value system. Domination by our “mother complex,” which has little to do with our personal mother, means that we are in