love and projection

“Has anyone ever learned to love? We can withdraw our projection certainly, and by so doing we can learn to understand one another. But I do not believe anyone ever learned to love.
“Love happens. It is a miracle that happens by grace. We have no control over it. It happens. It comes, it lights our lives, and very often it departs. We can never make it happen nor make it stay.” Pg. 116

“The miracle of being in love is too overwhelming an experience ever to be dismissed as a projection. I do not believe for one moment that a projection can in itself light up the whole world. It is the love which goes with it that lights the world.” Pg. 118

- Irene Claremont de Castillejo, Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology

Negative Animus

“It is the woman who is not using the animus creatively who is at his mercy for he must throw his light somewhere. So he attracts he attention by throwing his light on one formula or slogan after another quite regardless of their exact relevance. She falls into the trap and accepts what he shows her as gospel truth.
“A metallic note in a woman’s voice or some physical rigidity will announce his presence; it may be a stiffening of the shoulders; a slight twist of the lips or rigidity of the whole body. Words are powerless to remove him. Only action can do so – an affectionate gesture, a playful shake or even a cup of tea!
“Irrelevance is, I believe, the unmistakable hallmark of a negative animus statement. If looked at in isolation, animus generalizations are mostly sound remarks in themselves, for they are the fruit of experience garnered through the ages and they express the moral code of the place and time in history in which we live. But they happen to be irrelevant to the living moment.
“So we come to this: the animus is a woman’s greatest friend when he shines his light on what is relevant, and turns foe the moment he lapses into irrelevance.”- - Irene Claremont de Castillejo, Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology, Pg. 80

Anxiety

“If power is the most poisonous of the false attitudes we can adopt, anxiety is the most useless. Our worry never helps anyone. It is a most destructive form of idle fantasy. We surround the person we wish to protect with a mist of anxiety which only befuddles his possibility of clear thinking or clear action. Who knows whether it may not even bring about the disasters we are trying to avoid.
“To have a deep concern for anyone is to keep him in one’s heart without the interference of wishing, or still worse willing, any particular goal or outcome for him; yet with faith in the purposefulness of life and the belief in the need for that individual to fulfil his own unknown destiny.
“Concern is a leaving free with the utmost readiness to help if asked, and in the meantime a knowing that being on one’s own thread is true tending of the soil which will provide the surest ground for the right outcome; for it will help to keep clear the channels between what is and what will be, and blow away the confusing mists between our muddled existence and the ultimate purpose of our lives.” - Irene Claremont de Castillejo, Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology, Pg. 144

Horror in Dreams

A little late for Halloween, here are some quotes on the topic of horror from Hermes and His Children, by Rafael Lopez-Pedraza:

“An image of horror in dreams can be especially upsetting for a therapist without the background or attitude for dealing with it, believing with the faith of all believers that the patient is in a bad mental condition because of the horror images brought with him into psychotherapy; that the therapist’s office is to cure the patient’s illness by getting rid of the images of horror. There is no awareness that these very images arise, firstly, to compensate the patient’s nature and, secondly, to be recognized as an expression of the need for initiation through horror. Furthermore, I would suggest our aim should be to detect the horror image in the complex, not for diagnostic purposes, but to provide a view more suited to the patient’s nature. If, basically speaking, psychotherapy is to compensate, then we have to stick to the images of horror, for, even though we can neither understand them nor make much sense of them, it is these images which can compensate. All we can do is to withstand these images of horror, even when they appear profusely, until nature begins to metamorphose them into a more understandable psychic expression; for example, into a more commodious depression or individual view of life.” Pp. 166-167

“This evaluation of horror images offers a suggestion for psychotherapy, namely to conceive of them in terms of psychic-movers, contained in the memory (the main instrument of psychotherapy), and part of what is probably the psychotherapeutic virtue par excellence – Prudence. With the help of Prudence we can evaluate more accurately the image of horror in relation to the personality of the patient. It is Prudence that moves us into the art of dosage: dosing the image carefully and then leaving it to be assimilated.” Pg. 167

“Ziegler centers his therapy of some morbidities in the reflection on and connection to death, and has chosen the traditional medieval image of the Todeshochzeit, the wedding of death, for this purpose. I would add that the image of marriage with death is valid for the therapy of any kind of illness. How to deal with and reflect the constellation of Todeshochzeit, especially in dreams, requires, however, all the therapist’s art, as does the imagery of rape, which is implicitly a wedding with death.” Pp. 170-171

“The appearance of an imagery of death in psychotherapy is always welcome to a psychotherapist who knows how essential it is for the psyche’s life.” Pg. 202