Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

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

So, told or untold, the archaic stories ineluctably manifest through our unconscious choices, our aversions, our preoccupations, our projections, and our agendas and replay themselves in the recognizable patterns which constitute the human story.

the persistence of the past.

Part of why we get stuck is that there is a complex blocking our will, our intentionality, at least as strong as our hope for moving forward. Sometimes resolution, intentionality, willfulness, or concerted, sustained effort is enough to get unstuck, and we get through the blockage.

There is not a single therapeutic hour when I do not think about complexes, recognize their presence, and realize that we are always struggling with compelling spectral presences that have the power to usurp and manage this present hour,

The present is haunted by the archetypal dynamics which remind us that any story untold is an unconscious present.

William Faulkner, who once opined that “the past is not dead, it is not even past.”

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.

the summons to live our journey is a vocatus, a calling forth, quite separate from one's conscious desires?