Biographer Adam Phillips’ latest work is entitled Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. Phillips revealed in his biography that many of us struggle with little-understood inner conflicts that Freud tried to help us understand. “It was through attention to the unconscious that he made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions–our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations–yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love and want–may intend–never to relinquish it. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients, Phillips tells us, ‘was their (mostly unconscious) wish not to be cured.’”[i]
“The global village is certainly a place of misery and wretchedness for many of its inhabitants and we all realize that if it isn’t yet it will become so for the rest of us in the future. We face imaginary wizards, monsters and ogres which are all projections of our own shadow. Our only hope is to undertake the archetypal hero’s journey which we started unconsciously years ago. Only then will we realize that there are no ‘inhuman forces’ threatening us, certainly not ‘Nature’ nor the aging body let alone that scariest of all human creatures–evil in all of its guises.
Do we have hope for a hero or heroine with extraordinary courage and compassion, an archetypal rescuer? Yes we do and you are it.”[ii]
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Supplemental Reading: Anima and Animus, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#52 The Archetypal Rescuer
[i] Gornick, Vivian. “The Interpretation of Freud.” The New York Times Book Review. August 10, 2014, p. 10.
[ii] Henry, Roy Charles. “The Archetypal Hero and Compassion.” Who Am I? Create Space. October 2013, p. 116.
