“I must learn the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul.”
– C. G. Jung, The Red Book 

Returning the Soul to Psychology?

Eight months before C.G. Jung died, he wrote to a close friend, “I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field, and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.”

It is a true cry.

It speaks to the spiritual catastrophe that has given rise to many dis-eases of the soul. This is a legacy of 200 years of psychology without soul. Without the soul, we are disconnected from the life-giving waters of the interior life.

Modern psychology has forgotten its roots as the study of the psyche or the subject of the soul. The German humanists in the 1500s saw the soul as the animating interiorly that reflected on itself. They coined the word psychology.

Predominant psychological thought is stuck in a concrete literalism, focused on behavior and rationalism.   In the meantime, the human soul has become increasingly untethered to the imaginal metaphorical foundations that keep it connected and fulfilled.

Soul as a perspective

James Hillman, in Revisioning Psychology, suggests that the soul is a perspective rather than a thing. When viewed this way, the soul is an attitude towards life or a point of view.

This perspective can be mind-bending because we have to recognize the soul or psyche creates the reality in which we live.   The soul doesn’t reside in us. We reside in the psyche, and it frames everything that we experience. The soul mediates outer events into the subject experience.

How does the soul do that?

Since it is the lens through which we experience our life, we view life through the soul whenever we place our experience imaginatively.

Soul-making as increased capacity

For many modern spiritual teachers, our life purpose is to cultivate the soul and to embark on a journey toward the experience of our true individuality. Jung called this individuation.

How do we cultivate our soul?

Jungian Analyst Lionel Corbett explains soul-making as the active practice of cultivating interiority where we process our experience psychologically as a metaphor and an image.

Hillman suggests that this requires personifying objects into the soul’s perspective. This is our capacity for imagination and reflection where it is possible to experience meaning.

Here is what Hillman says, “my soul is not the result of objective facts that require explanation;  rather, it reflects subjective experiences that require understanding.’a

And that requires that we shift out of the literal and the concrete.

For example:

When we feel that life is as dry as a desert, there are no life-giving emotional waters to give life meaning.

When we are touched by a moving piece of music that touches us to the core.

We have a soulful conversation with a friend who will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

These are all moments of the soul.

Copyright Christina Becker
March 2022

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Soul-Making: A Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery  (January 2025)

My soul-making journey came in the form of an unrelenting series of traumatic events between 2009 and 2011, which brought me to my knees. My youngest brother’s mental illness and struggles with the law reached a feverish intensity, and my father was dying of cancer. Something of the power and intensity of the events broke me, like a tree branch under too much weight. I remember the snap.

Soul-Making: A Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery takes the reader through this suffering and the search for meaning in life events that make no sense.

What is the meaning of suffering and how do I find we find our way through?

The biggest betrayal, however, was not the events themselves but an idealistic belief that all my years of personal therapy and training as a Jungian Analyst afforded me immunity from tragedy. It was not true. Trauma can strike at any time and any age, and when it did, I suffered a crisis of faith in talk therapy. Everything I believed about Jungian psychology and the role that it had played in my life for over three decades was called into question.

The answer was found in a spiritual philosophy and relationship to something larger than psychology. During my descent into the darkness and my return, I adopted a series of practices which brought a deeper understanding of the spiritual dimension of Jung’s psychology and restored meaning, content, and wisdom to my life. This book is more than a memoir. It is a demonstration of soul-making in action.

 

Soul-Making: A Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery is an invitation.

Through telling my story, I invite the reader to embark on their soul-making journey.

Praise for Soul-Making 

“It inspired me to think about my life in a new way”.

“I couldn’t put it down. The story was so compelling.”

“The telling of this story pulled me into descriptions of the exquisite beauty of Autumn in the life of a family. The writer’s inquiry into her most profound awareness of questions that one asks quietly amid a crisis.”

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