Description
This volume of essays ensues from the 7th Jungian Odyssey retreat, held in Flüeli-Ranft, an idyllic agricultural village in in the central Swiss Alps. The authors are training analysts and scholarly guests of the International School of Analytical Psychology Zürich.
The serene Flüeli-Ranft lies at the center of a magnificent temenos of valleys, rivers, lakes, and woodlands encircled by breath-taking snow-topped mountain peaks. Since the 15th century the village has been a renowned place of pilgrimage, for it is the home of Brother Klaus-who, in the name of God, abandoned his beloved wife and ten children to become a mendicant monk. He spent his last twenty years as a hermit and mystic, living in a tiny cell in the Flüeli Gorge. Klaus’s unorthodox biography and religious visions have been studied by many scholars, including C.G. Jung.
The spirit of this place subtly permeates these essays on love’s peaks and valleys. The authors illuminate love in its many forms, and observe its joys, risks, and ravages. They contribute insight from the analytic consulting room, and draw as well on theology, folk song, legend, myth, theater, and the visual arts. Picking up a thread that runs throughout, Ann Ulanov writes, “To love a particular someone, a definite idea, a distinct place, a principal symbol, or notion of the psyche, opens us to loss with all its searing pain.” Readers of this volume will find encouragement, but no easy answers. In the end, the authors might be said to concur with Jung’s frank confession, “… I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love and have never been able to explain what it is.
