Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

and to understand them psychologically without “psychologizing” them.

This is why Jung observed that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.

the persistence of the past.

[Are we] related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of [one's] life . . . If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted

survival and well-being: abandonment and being overwhelmed.

Thus, what is most troubling about complexes is their capacity to remove a discriminating judgment from this moment of consciousness, assert, even impose, a historic view generated from an earlier, more likely disempowered place in our history.

Since a complex has a quantum of energy, charged by history, it always manifests in the body, perhaps as a constriction of the throat, a flutter in the solar plexus, tightening of the muscles, and it always floods the moment with an extra charge of affect.

Jung once observed that each therapist must ask the question: What task is this person's neurosis helping him or her avoid?

Remember that Jung said when he heard the word mother he thought unreliable and when he heard father he thought powerless. Where did he come by these associations other than by having had a history in which these entities were loaded up with valences?

But even more, and paradoxically, that repetition to feel our chosen pain is still preferable to reexperiencing the primal pain anew.