Dark Light of the Soul

269 Pages·2008·3.612 MB·English

by  Kathryn Wood Madden

DARK LIGHT
OF THE SOUL
Kathryn Wood Madden
*
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Lindisfarne Books
2008
£
xoo8
Lindisfarne Books
PO Box 749
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.steinerbooks.org
Copyright © 2008 by Kathryn Wood Madden. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Cover and book design: William Jens Jensen
Cover image by Alexandr Shebanov
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Madden, Kathryn Wood.
Dark light of the soul I Kathryn Wood Madden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 257).
ISBN 978-1-58420-065-9
r. Psychology, Religious. 2. Psychology and religion.
3. Experience (Religion) 4. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961.
5. Böhme, Jakob, 1575-16^4. 6. Mysticism. I. Title.
BL53.M3615 2008
200.1*9—dC22
2008040892
Contents
Preface ix
i. Unitary Reality i
2. Distinctions between Psychology and Religion 19
3. Radical Otherness 47
4. Jung and the Pleroma 69
5. When Deep Calls unto Deep 87
6. The Self: Uniting Opposites 108
7. Meeting Clinical Otherness 130
8. Trauma, Dreams, and Resistance to Otherness 159
9. Soul Retrieval: The Lonely One 193
10. Through the Air Hole 233
References 2-57
Acknowledgments
Barry Ulanov said once to me that one of the greatest gifts
we can offer another person is that of a supportive pres­
ence. I would like to acknowledge the many persons who
have given me such during the writing of this book.
I would like to thank my patients who, while their
names and partial identities have been changed to respect
their anonymity, I am very grateful for their allowing me to
tell their stories. Without them, I would have only what one
patient calls “a castle surrounded by clouds and air with no
foundation.” The persons who have shared their struggles,
dreams, and visions in this text are the ground and flesh of
this endeavor.
The warm encouragement of my therapist colleagues in
New York, Don Kalsched, Carol Fox, Joan Kavanaugh, my
friend Terah Cox, Bonnie Ward, and Bette Hack consis­
tently have given me the supportive entry to my own expe­
rience of the unconscious, the encouragement to take risks,
to dig deeper, and to move into the abyss itself, confident
that there would always be the intervention of an angel.
Ewert Cousins, Professor of Theology Emeritus at
Fordham University, Randall Styers, Associate Professor
of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, and
Harry Fogarty, lecturer at Union Theological Seminary and
Jungian analyst have inspired my work and the choice of
my sources. They have challenged me to see further to the
more complex fact of the opposites of opposites.
Ann Ulanov, along with her husband Barry, represent
the beginning and end of this piece. They have been the
living reality of the central image of my work. In their
reciprocity of being, I have learned the deeper meaning of
exchange.
Much of this work is about interrelationship and the
importance of otherness on many levels. Each of us is inex­
orably linked to the other. In the writing of this piece, I
have emphasized that a person’s developmental reality is
only one level of experience. Yet, the gift of loving parents
also can assist in enabling us to “see through” to a larger
truth. Even though they are gone from this world, I would
like to acknowledge my parents, Doris and Fergus Wood.
Finally, there is my husband, Ron. That other half who
is at the intersection of one’s soul, contributes to the teme-
nos, the sacred space in which reflection and growth can
occur that allows for the Self to unfold. The Self of one
includes the other because the Self contains a profound
circumference. In essence, this journey has been as trans­
formational for Ron as it has for me. As von Franz says,
it becomes difficult to tell at some point who is mirroring
whom. For this lovely man, who has the gift of grounded­
ness, intelligence, and laughter, and, most important, rec­
ognition of “the deep,” I am forever grateful.

Preface
n an age focused increasingly upon a cultural, political,
I
and social understanding of otherness as diversity, pre­
ferring to ponder God, if at all, mostly in terms of imma­
nence^ depth psychology is in danger of becoming breadth
psychology. The search for transcendence has become more
and more the province of New Age weekend workshops.
On the other hand, depth psychology that seeks only the
transpersonal without the incarnate spirit in the flesh of
everyday relationships in history may likewise prove to be
a failed enterprise.
In such an era, we may expand our vision to reviewing
something of the inner journeys of the seventeenth-century
Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme and the twentieth-century
depth psychologist C. G. Jung. Each was passionately
engaged with the immediacy of experience, yet each
believed in the vital importance of spirit as a real and
transforming presence in human life. Reflection upon the
crosscurrents in the experiences and select writings of these
two intriguing visionaries may help to ground the work
that we do as depth psychologists, clinical practitioners,
teachers, and those whose interests lie in the arenas of
religious experience and spirituality.
In this work, I compare and contrast Boehme’s and
Jung’s experiences with a special focus on the religious
or psychological experience of what Erich Neumann calls
x Dark Light of the Soul
unitary reality, a ground of being that contains all oppo­
sites in potentiality. I examine and analyze these expe­
riences from the overlapping yet distinct viewpoints of
depth psychology and religion, with the goal of offering
what I find meaningful for anyone who is on the journey
of healing and wholeness—as well as instructive to the
professional working in a clinical setting.
Unitary Reality
his book rests on the premise that a unitary reality
T
underlies all psychological experience. The experience
of this unitary reality is the culmination of an encounter
with the deepest layer of the collective unconscious, the psy-
choid, archetypal layer, in which we meet all forms of oth­
erness. The otherness we meet at this depth of experience is
so radically transforming that all that was formerly known
to us and thought to be real from the ego’s point of view is
surpassed. Drawing from Jacob Boehme’s and Carl Jung’s
images of radical otherness, a new reality is born—the Self
in Jung’s terms, Christ in Boehme’s terms—a unitary real­
ity that enables us to see through our newly constellated
reality to our former origins, to a pre-differentiated, uni­
versal ground.
Innate to this experience of depth, we find throughout
history and in comparative literature that, psychologically
speaking, a breakdown of varying degrees often accompa­
nies a breakthrough to this unitary reality. Deintegration,
or fragmentation, seem to be important aspects preceding
the integration of all the disparate parts that are contained
in what is experienced psychologically as unitary reality,
or oneness. The experience of unitary reality may be a
Dark Light of the Soul
single event that happens once as a way for the persdrfal-
ity to restructure and locate a new intrapsychic core from
which the ego can proceed in its development. More often,
unitary reality is the culmination of a long process of
struggle and suffering that we engage in through analysis
or psychotherapy or spiritual direction, or even through
our own creative endeavors of seeking, in which we are led
down, or into the Black Hole of what Martin Buber called
“the divine Void.”
Jungian analyst Erich Neumann, who analyzed with
Jung and practiced as an analyst in Tel Aviv, describes this
breakthrough event or process as “a borderline experience
of the beginning of all things that corresponds to the mys­
tic’s experience of the universal diffusion of the unitary
reality” (Neumann, 1989, p.74).
The outcome of the experience of unitary reality is a
meeting of human spirit with divine spirit. This conjunc­
tion or sacred marriage conjoins the spirit of the divine
with the body of nature. Our consciousness changes. We
begin to know that we have a distinct and personal identity
that is known by something far more vast and more trans­
personal than our ego. We are infused with new confidence
that this other that knows us so distinctly will embrace
the specificity of our identity long after the ego and the
body that houses it have^passed back into the earth. Thus,
the process of struggle and becoming very attentive to our
inner lives, images, and feelings is a worthwhile endeavor
since it gives meaning to existence.
Becoming active participants in the vital process of life­
transforming encounter with the collective unconscious
requires that we attend not only to the role of experience