Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

All relationships, all relationships, involve two elemental psychological mechanisms at all times: projection and transference.

Jung argued that neurosis is inauthentic suffering,

[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.

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

we are not just programmed to repetition, but that at some level we perversely choose it in order to exercise a measure

We can be possessed not only by “spirits” but by contagious ideas, fads, fashions, and fears compelling enough to launch persecutions, pogroms, and mass enthusiasms.

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

In the face of any compelling message we have three tendencies. First we are inclined to serve the message, repeat it, identify with it, and replicate it—the more so as the model operates unconsciously within. The second most common reaction is to react against the model and its explicit and implicit messages. “I will be anything but like my mother