Description
Depth psychology, in its practical application, is the heir of three noble traditions: the medical tradition of the care of patients, the religious tradition of concern for the soul, and the philosophical tradition of dialogue in the search for truth. This particular study centers on the third tradition, the philosophical one.
The purpose of this book, however, is not to study philosophy but rather to track the psyche as it manifests in the archetypal ideas that so gripped the early Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. These ideas are psychic organisms that still live in us, as we see in images from the unconscious that spontaneously appear in dreams, drawings and active imagination.
We know that many cultures hold it vital to their well being to be in touch with their ancestors; it promotes our psychological health as well to be in touch with the early Greeks, our cultural ancestors, who were the first to articulate certain ideas and images that are central to the Western psyche. Such study connects us with our own psychic roots, which reside in the collective unconscious, laid down like geological strata during the evolution of the human psyche.
The danger in our time is that Greek philosophy is by and large seen as an abstract skeleton, all structure and no life. Dr. Edinger’s Jungian perspective revitalizes this bedrock of the Western psyche by relating archetypal ideas to modern experience.
