Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology After Neuroscience

Review by Lyn Cowan Ph.D., analyst and author Lyn Cowan is a Jungian analyst practicing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has served as Director of Training and then as President of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. She is the author of: "Tracking the White Rabbit: A Subversive View of Modern Culture" and of: "Masochism: A Jungian View". This review was written for the members of the International Association of Jungian Studies. ------------ 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. So I am exercising as much self-restraint as I can so as not to destroy my credibility ("Oh, it can't be that good!"), and I will try to harness my passion for the excellent writing and a fluid style that glides the eye right along the pages of this book. I have long believed that style - the manner in which one presents oneself, either verbally, or in fashion, or gesture - is much deeper than a superficial socially-constructed persona: style is substance, the package which carries the content, and the content is not separate from the package. Paris's jargon-free language invites us to look into the windows of her agile mind without making us feel intrusive. She writes personally but not confessionally, is emphatic but not dogmatic in her positions, and speaks to us with controlled passion and dry, sparkling wit. There are weaknesses in this book - every book must have some. The subtitle ("Depth Psychology after Neuroscience") is somewhat misleading, as there is not as much about neuroscience as one would expect. The chapter titled "Brother Philosophy, Sister Psychology" could have been tighter; though interesting, it still felt too digressive. There were some lines here and there that didn't sit quite right, but my memory traces of them are too faint to note. In my view, the book's few shortcomings pale beside the richness and quality of thought that characterizes nearly all of Paris's work, and so they kept slipping out of my mind. Readers of Wisdom of the Psyche will have to find their own complaints. The first chapter is titled, "Denting My Thick Skull," in which Paris sets the personal context and then describes her horrific fall into an empty concrete swimming pool in New Mexico, the life-threatening brain injury that resulted, and her recovery. This by itself is an amazing account, told from within that inert body as Paris notes the unexpected, frightening, unintelligible and often achingly beautiful events that are transpiring within and around her. Like a wounded bull collapsing in the ring, I feel myself dying. It is just as well, for my heart is already dead. Soon there will be no body to suffer the failure of love. Pain, all modalities of pain, would all be over if I let this fragile bird or butterfly the Greeks called "soul" take flight. I shut my eyes and fall into a deep h

I have already recommended this book to two people, neither is a therapist or a depth psychologist. I didn't want to put the book down once I began reading. The entry into the book and the experience of the Underworld is riveting. It never occurred to me that one would be so completely conscious when the body is so traumatized. Dr. Paris' writing about this journey takes you right along with her. There is mystery surrounding the loving care she receives from a Mexican woman attending her seriously damaged body, and who cares even more for her soul. And there is the miracle of healing that emerges from the deep love between the newly fragile mother and the strong daughter who takes charge. This story of a serious physical accident and its unlikely outcome opens the door to what cannot be touched by neuroscience. This is a wonderful book. It broadens our understanding of the ways in which the archetypal psychological perspective can benefit us both individually, and as participants in society. Dr. Paris' brilliance as an archetypal psychologist is plainly visible. The pages are filled with wisdom and insight, very creatively expressed. I highly recommend this book.

As a person with nearly 20 years of experience in the Pharmaceutical industry (working in Neuroscience) and developing interests in depth-psychology, I was intrigued by the title of Ginette Paris' work: The Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience. Her book, however, contained very little on "Neuroscience." It did however, contain a great deal on a variety of topics relative to depth psychology. Paris asks an important question; what is the future of depth psychology given the takeover from neuroscience and pharmacology? She answers that question by stepping back from the medical and psychodynamic models to engage the subject mater at an archetypal level relayed through her own personal and traumatic confrontation with death, the unconscious, and a miraculous recovery. Her experience is supported by a number of case histories from her practice. Paris takes a bold stance, stating that depth psychology is not to be lumped in with the sciences. While the field of depth psychology was discovered by scientists, taking a scientific approach, depth psychology is not a science. Thank You Ginette! Depth psychology is not a science because its subject matter, the psyche, is not amenable to reduction; psyche is not reproducible, verifiable, or willing to be contained, defined or restricted at any level. The field of depth psychology is closer to that of the humanities, where key to working with psyche is an ever evolving dynamic imagination. In reality depth psychology fits neither in the sciences or the humanities; it is In-Between, just as its fundamental intrinsic nature is In-Between. While I enjoyed all of Paris' book, I found her last chapter entitled "Joy: The Antidote to Anxiety" the most important for our society. Paris draws an important distinction between "fear" and "anxiety." While "fear" has an object, "anxiety" does not; the object of our anxiety is "hidden." Our society is a society suffering from anxiety (I would call it chronic, low-grade stress). Regardless of the terminology, anxiety shuts a person down and, I believe, suppresses the immune system resulting in an entire host of medical conditions that I as a neuroscientist have worked to develop drugs for (e.g., anxiety and depression). The role of anxiety in other disease states (e.g., cancer, heart disease, obesity, etc.), for which neuroscience does not concern itself, should not be overlooked. While anxiety shuts a person down and suppresses the immune system, fear calls for action (and, I believe, stimulates the immune system), flight or fight being the two basic instincts of survival. A millennia of evolution has provided our species with mechanisms for dealing with fear. We, however, do not seem to have developed an evolutionary response to anxiety. Paris addresses the problem of anxiety from the position of depth psychology, stating that, "anxiety comes with the loss of images." Paris tells us that, in our culture, we have replaced images with concepts and fea

Dr. Paris boldly expresses her intimate perceptions of not only her inner process, but of the intellectual milieu of her profession. The depth and width of her education are clearly evident, but what spoke to me most profoundly was her courage in her own voice. I experienced this book as a proclamation that has been brewing her entire career, and finally became unleashed following her own confrontation with death. Thankfully, that confrontation did not end in demise, but resulted in renewal and a sense of empowerment that no doubt will benefit her relationships and scholarly endeavors. I highly recommend this treatise for those interested in the field of inner work, and especially to those hungry to hear a strong woman accessibly speak her truth.

I am a Pacifica graduate (Depth Psychology) who teaches several psychology-related subjects at Bay Area campuses, and I plan to share with my students--particularly Depth Psych students at Sonoma State--some of my delight with Paris's clear, forcible writing. The book's title should probably be considered a point of departure because relatively little of the book deals with DP's relation to neuroscience, although it does begin there with a severe crack on the head. To me the book felt like an excursion through many layers and levels: psychology, philosophy, spirituality, myth, science, feminism (not really an "ism"), personal accounts, even therapy client narratives. Like psyche the book roams but without ever departing from its inherently self-organizing central motifs, one of which is how DP is to understand itself. What is its role in a world of DSM-style categorizations and in a nation like the U.S. where half the population lives on psychotropic medication? In part this book is a project of deconstruction. Its targets include organized religion's imagination-killing counterphobic emphasis on belief, the psychology/psychiatry industry's willingness to medicate symptoms instead of listening to them, unnecessary oppositions between cognitive-behavioral work and DP (I particularly appreciate this from having worked for six years with violent men referred for mandatory therapy), and therapy sold as a kind of secular salvation. Paris also criticizes the authoritarianism of exalting one theory over another: "Any ideology that tries to reduce words to their utilitarian or technical meaning turns out to be a totalitarian one." Her wit also shines through, as when she offhandedly remarks that literalists have ruined the word "miracle" for the rest of us. I finished the book thinking about its call to consider DP a separate realm of endeavor from "science," with the depth traditions more in league with the humanities than with the fantasy of objectivity. As a research instructor who teaches both quantitative and qualitative methods, I found myself wondering whether we need consider the paradigm laid down by Francis Bacon the only way to do real science. It seems to me that aligning DP with the humanities runs the risk of abandoning the definition of science to the positivists and materialists instead of challenging us to ask whether science can be, say, artistic, or literary, or more depth-oriented than crunching numbers. When Jung told himself he was a scientist, his anima disagreed and said he was doing art, true enough: but if the unconscious counterbalances the conscious mind's narrow focus, perhaps the truth was somewhere in between.... I was glad to see Pierre Janet mentioned. He seldom appears in the DP literature. It is unfortunate that despite Henri Ellenberger's own deconstructive work we have tended to believe Freud's description of Janet as wedded to physiology when in fact he created what might have been the first fully dynamic system