Book review of The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. 2012. Scriber. New York.  Theatrical debut of Toibin’s adaptation of the book opens on Broadway this Spring. Previews begin at the Walter Kerr Theater on March 26, opening April 22. Featuring Irish actress Fiona Shaw as the Virgin Mary.

Whether you are a Christian, a student of archetypal psychology, or a person who is simply curious about un-masking the myth of perfection,  Colm Toibin’s compelling novella is for you. I doubt it is fare for fundamentalists, who would be horrified that this Mary doesn’t believe her son’s claims of divinity, but this seems a tragic irony. The very people who want to be closest to the Virgin Mary, would reject Toibin’s beautiful characterization as “heresy”.

Their loss. Surely, if these folks could hold their breaths, and delve into Toibin’s prose, they would feel their hearts open to the struggles of this older woman looking back on a hard life, alienated from her community, following the years when she lost her son on the cross.

Toibin enters the mind of a mother, and, like any human mom, she has known her son from birth, was skeptical of his self-made ministry, seeing clearly how influenced he was by those who needed him to be the God he is not.

If this has the flavor of the 1960’s Paul Newman film, Cool Hand Luke, the parallel is accurate. In that gritty tale, the inmates of a Southern chain gang came to idolize Luke, a rebel and a loner, projecting into him a hero status they could not aspire to on their own. In much the same way, Toibin’s Mary sees the apostles maneuvering the young Christ, inflating his ego, spreading tales of his miracles.

And yet, Toibin weaves a complex tale. As the stories of the miracles are told in flashback, Mary has no clear explanation for some of them. In the wedding scene she sees a vat of water which become wine – but was this slight of hand? She sees the “resurrected” Lazarus, but was he truly buried in the first place?  She does what most mothers would do: love her son, tell him home truths, feel despair when he doesn’t listen to her, and struggle to survive his tragic choices she cannot prevent.

The Testament of Mary awakens a new version of the archetype mother goddess, and, for Christians, invites empathy for a woman who did not allow herself to be the victim. Toibin’s Mary sees the world and human nature with a discerning mind. She can have doubts, feel remorse, be cranky about getting old, question authority, and long for the babe she once held in her arms. There is great freedom in realizing you don’t have to be perfect, that your job is to be real and whole and flawed and alive on this earth, as she was.

“The act of acceptance, of acknowledging that change is a natural part of our interaction with others, can play a vital role in our relationships. These transitional periods can become pivotal points where true love can begin to mature and flower. We are now in a position to truly begin to know the other. To see the other as a separate individual, with faults and weaknesses, a human being like ourselves. It is only at this point that we can make a genuine commitment, a commitment to the growth of another human being – an act of love.”  –Howard Cutler quoted in Offerings: Buddhist wisdom for every day by Danielle and Oliver Follmi.

This month, as we are barraged by candy displays, fluffy pink bears, and all manner of Valentine cards, it seems a good time to reflect on the complex and ever-changing nature of intimate relationships. In this regard the popular media has seldom been our friend, ever pandering to that very real part of us that hums, “Someday My Prince Will Come”, longing for a perfect, unconditional love that replicates the infant/parent bond. It may be that we long for this in proportion to the trauma we experienced in early life, literally seeking in a romantic partner what we did not get from our parents.

In his landmark book, Getting the Love You Want , Harville Hendrix proposes just this: we seek what we did not get in childhood in our mates, and it is up to both partners in the relationship to articulate this, and to find this fulfillment in adult life. There is much truth to this, but I find that people also need to develop an independent and self-nurturing capacity, ie, do both: learn to love yourself, and then, out of this love, choose a partner from your own high self-esteem who is just as capable of self-love and intimacy.

A tall order, particularly because so many of our choices of a partner are made on the surface, when we are so young we don’t have a depth of understanding of mature love that Howard Cutler writes about.  We “fall” in love, the very term betraying a plunge from rational consciousness. “Love is blind”: we are motivated out of passion, obsession, desire. Our films and legends are full of this, and no matter how often we see the dark side of love portrayed (From Romeo and Juliet to the beautiful Danish film, A Royal Affair), we continue to “fall” again and again.

The makers of Valentine chocolates and floral displays know this all too well. Ironically, the real Saint Valentine was a rebel priest living under the oppression of the Roman emperor Claudias (Some may remember the marvelous BBC series with Derek Jacobi as the stuttering emperor). Valentine was all about promoting monogamy in a promiscuous society where women had no rights and were predominantly victims of polygamy, slavery, or prostitution. Claudias enacted a decree that prohibited the marriage of young people. He believed that unmarried soldiers fought better than married ones, because married men might be afraid of what would happen to them or their wives and families if they died.

Valentine set about to marry young people in secret, believing not only in the Christian sanctity of marriage and family, but that people needed the sacred bond of intimacy in order to become most fully human. For his conviction and Romantic beliefs, he was imprisoned, and tortured. During his incarceration, he was able to pray with and reportedly, to heal the blind daughter of a magistrate. Ultimately Valentine was assigned to a three part execution of beating, stoning, and decapitation. His last words were an endearing letter to the magistrate’s now-seeing daughter, “from your Valentiine.”

It is fascinating to contemplate how Western society transformed this tragic tale into hearts and flowers. Some would say commerce knows how to manipulate mass psychology. Indeed in the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud made a voyage from Vienna to America and met with innovators of the advertising agency. The result, among many other mass manipulations, is “Valentine’s Day”.

Am I a Scrooge about Valentine’s Day? Quite the contrary. Whatever its origins, February 14^th is a marvelous opportunity to express the depth of your love for everyone in your life: partner, children, parents, relations, dear friends. By peering beneath the cardboard heart, we can open ourselves to the complexity and bounty of love. As we love ourselves, so we can deepen our love, enthusiasm, and expression for others.

I close with another quote from Offerings, by psychologist and Buddhist monk, Jack Kornfield: “Our capacity for intimacy is built on deep respect, a presence that allows what is true to express itself, to be discovered. Intimacy can arise at any moment; it is an act of surrender, a gift that excludes nothing.”

And a final tip of the hat to the real Saint Valentine, who had the moral courage and self-esteem to value own judgment above the dictates of a corrupt authority. A healer, who honored the value of women, and the loving heart in all of us.

Book review of FREUD’S SISTER by Goce Smilevski, translated from the Macedonia by Christine E. Krammer. Penguin Books, 2012

Some weeks ago I was talking with a friend who had just read the Joyce Carol Oates review of FREUD’S SISTER in the New York Times. She was shocked and outraged to learn that the factual event embedded in Goce Smilevski’s lyrical novel is Freud’s abandonment of his four sisters in 1938 Vienna. He could have procured a visa for them. Instead, he packed up his nuclear family, his servants and his dog, and fled to London, leaving them to deportation and death in a concentration camp.

“I wonder if they ever forgave him,” I asked.

“I would curse him with my dying breath!” said my friend.

We left it hanging in the air, and yet the conversation returned again and again to the theme of emotional justice.

In his opening artist’s note, Smilevski quotes one of Freud’s letters, referring to the novel’s narrator, Aldofina as “the sweetest and best of my sisters”. Smilevski feel a kinship with her, and states he hopes to “rescue in fiction one of the many lives forgotten by history”.

In doing so he also creates a portrait of Sigmund Freud seen through the eyes of his closest childhood playmate, his confidante, at once placing herself at a distance from him, and longing to return to the closeness of their early childhood, throughout her life.

Aldofina is delightfully unpredictable, in her choices and her colloquy with her bother. She tells him that beauty, not religion, is the greatest comfort in life, yet takes on his atheism as arrogance: “The rest of us will perish, but the great Sigmund Freud will live on, in immortal works”. Indeed, Freud’s high opinion of his immortality is palpable. He  tells a male colleague, “Copernicus taught man that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin taught man that he is descended from apes, and I have taught man that he is not who he thinks he is.”

Yet Aldofina claims this narrative as her own, ever moving toward meaning, passion, love and truth. Being so close to Freud, she is loathe to adopt his theories blindly. His internal anti-Semitism is exposed in her critique of Moses and Monotheism, where he asserts Moses was an Egyptian, not a Jew, fashioning his concept of God to appease the pharaoh. One could speculate that his rejection of Orthodox Jewish faith and identification with all things German may have played into Freud’s abandonment of his sisters, on an unconscious, if not conscious level. The novel wisely lets us do our own speculating, by simply allowing Aldofina to tell her story.

One of her greatest gifts to the reader is to pose implicit questions essential to our modern time, to all time: What is “normal”? What is “madness”? How are we to bear the loss and betrayal inherent in our lives?  And embedded in the circumstances of the story, and in the heartbeat of Aldofina, so beautifully evoked we can almost hear it, as if listening to an audio book: what do we owe to our family? To our fellow our fellow human beings?

It is incumbent upon the reader to provide answers, or, indeed, ask more questions: where are the boundaries of what we owe to our own self-development, and where we owe attention, love, and support to others?

A related question: what is the place in our world for the mentally ill?  In the novel this is graphically etched for us when Aldofina finds respite for her depression at “The Nest”, a home for those identified in Victorian Vienna as “mad”. We enter the corridors of the fascinating souls who live here. Is it horribly bleak? In some ways, of course, but our author also provides a project for the inmates to put on a carnival for the entire community. Costumes are created that evoke the “mad” souls’ greatest fantasies of self-glory, recalling the film of the 1970’s, King of Hearts.

Aldofina’s  brothers pay for her long stay at The Nest. We see evidence daily of what happens in our modern world to the mentally ill who do not have family resources.

FREUD’S SISTER gives us a canvas broad and deep. Can we respond in kind, by allowing its beauty to inspire our own inquiry, contemplation…action?

This holiday season I was honored to attend a potluck at a local yoga studio. Candles encircled the room, the smell of cinnamon and hot spices all around us.  A stranger posed an interesting question, “What is worth doing?”

Many gave answers, or simply sat quietly. The stranger answered that he valued his work, the people he loved, playing the guitar, and doing yoga. “I can let the rest of it go.”

I have thought about this often in the last few days.  We are bombarded with so many distractions, so many ideas about who we should be and how we should behave. How do we plow through the quagmire and come to that place within us that knows what is worth doing, what brings us the most joy and self-respect, and what pulls us into anxiety or self judgment?

Focusing on the “should’s” is often a way to increase self criticism and lower self esteem. –I should lose weight—I should go to law school -I should make more money – I should save the world—

If one looks to the wisdom of the East: yoga, tai chi, the spiritual practices of Tao, Buddhism, Hinduism – the path to Enlightenment is not achieved by frantic conformity to what society dictates. It is achieved by first looking deeply into the concept of “achievement”. What is really possible, given ones life circumstance, talents, limitations? This does not mean being passive or lazy. Quite the opposite. It means taking an inventory of your self, looking at your environment, your reality, and asking, as the stranger asked, “what is worth doing?”  Most precisely, “What is possible for me, given that I desire a full, healthy, joyful life in community with others?”

We must all conform in obvious ways: stop at a red light, go forward on a green one, make enough money to provide food, shelter, education for our families, but this does not preclude our ability choose an attitude of peace, joy, and wisdom, in any given situation. With practice, and commitment to psychological and spiritual growth, we can learn to stand up to the negative energies in our world and ourselves. To choose serenity over anxiety, anger, self-indulgence.

Our world is struggling to overcome tragedy, violence, and pain. We cannot save the world. In our hearts we know this, but many of us desire this, more than anything.

Can we honor this desire by making a New Year’s Resolution to achieve a thriving connection with our deepest inner being? To become closer to the part of us that is strong, vulnerable, ethical? Taking the time to nourish this connection – simple steps, like stopping in the middle of a frantic day to look at a tree out the window, breathe deeply, feel the reality of our inner soul, our anima.  In this and a thousand other ways we can find meaning, and joy in a 2013 worth living.

If someone had a dream of the massacre of children; a mother slain by the son’s own hand who then takes his life, what would it mean?

As the world searches for answers – and perhaps new questions – in the wake of the slaughter in Connecticut, I struggle to imagine what I would do if I were sitting with the author of this dream.

“But this is no dream,” you cry. “This is a horrible reality.”

Yes, but as we search for meaning, exploring multiple dimensions of reality, including images from the unconscious mind, may be instructive.

If the dreamer of such a horrible nightmare came to me, I would begin by listening to the story, in every detail, simply honoring the level of horror.  A Greek tragedy of such epic proportions, Sophocles could never have conceived of it, even in a culture that enslaved and exploited children.

Is this a possible theme: something is not being honored in the sacred child, in American culture, and in other cultures around the world. To honor the sacred in  a child is not to “spoil” her, but to cherish her.

Perhaps I should use the pronoun “him”, since the perpetrators of recent massacres have all been young males. This begs the question:

is there a wound in the infantile masculine that runs so deep, and echoes of such rage, it finds expression in these heinous acts?

And, what do we mean by “the masculine”? Is it about gender, or about the spirit, the animus, the creative drive in all human beings that to flourish, requires the nourishment of the inner life.

Return to the dreamer. Was he or she “assaulted” as a child?  Are the bullets in the dream symbolic of emotional attacks? Does this express the genesis of the dreamer’s profound self-hatred? If so, where does this hatred of the self come from? A boy who could never “fit in”, in a culture where not fitting in feels like emotional death?

Does the inner child of the dreamer still suffer from an undernourished soul? If so, how do we bring more of this nourishment into our relationships, our families, our schools, our art, games and communities?

Can we replace video violence and aggressive games with a new spirit of adventure that truly nourishes the soul? What would look like? It could take many forms, including creative art, rituals, journeys into nature, discovering new or your own neighborhood in the spirit of a life-long odyssey to redeem the Sacred, for our children, and for the child within every adult.

“Naïve”, you say. “Children growing up in poverty don’t have access to these enrichments.” True. But, the massacres did not take place in the inner city. They took place in the community forums of middle-class America: shopping malls, movie theaters, universities, high schools, elementary schools…

And, I may not be a question of shifting the form, ie, children can still play baseball, climb trees and have imaginal play. It is the motivation, the goal, and the content that needs to change, from a focus on prevailing, conquering, or getting esteem at all costs, to nourishing, honoring, and cherishing the growth of inner creative being.

Ironically, at least one of the young victims of the Connecticut massacre, the little girl called Emily, was, according to her Dad,  “a wonderful artist; the kindest person I had ever known.”

Can we take full advantage of this global grief, to take action that goes to the archetypal roots of this slaughter? Yes, enact strict gun control laws! Yes, please, dear God, improve the mental health system!! And yes, address the other level, of reality, moving with power and conviction, to nourish the sacred child soul in us all.

One of the great joys of creative work is unexpected inspiration that comes, as if by magic, from the hidden depths of the imagination. This can take many forms. Mozart walked the streets of Vienna with a terrible headache, finally dashing back to his room to write down a complete symphony.

Recently, in the flow of writing my new play, a character blurted out, “Find yourself outside yourself, as the earth encircles the sun.” I was thrilled! The perfect line for that character, and nothing I could have predicted.

Now, in the holiday season, when we are bombarded with the mandate to Give, I ask myself what that phrase really means.: find yourself outside yourself…

On the surface, it seems to prescribe a life of selfless devotion in service to others, the very mandate that has turned so many people away from organized religion. “Give up myself?” some would say, “but I have been struggling to find my true self for years! “

The word sacrifice comes from the Latin, “sacred” and “to make”: to make sacred.  It can be a sacred discovery to find joy in giving to others.  Charles Dickens immortalized this in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. The ghosts in his dreams hold a mirror to Scrooge’s soul, and he comes to understand himself as never before. He sees how much he has lost by clinging to his small obsessions and desires. With self-knowledge, he can look “outside himself”, and is transformed from a man who lives “inside himself” to one who gives ebulliently to others.

“Making sacred” could also mean that you can “find yourself” by sacrificing your frantic pursuit of self-esteem through the approval of others.  This opens a space in the psyche for the true self, the part of us motivated to manifest our sacred destiny, however eccentric or unconventional that may be. We no longer give away our power to others or over-value their evaluation of us.

We are free.

When we learn to approve of and love ourselves, we can see “outside” with new eyes. The needs and opinions of others take on a different reality. We aren’t dependent on other people to define who we are, so we can reach out to them, celebrate their achievements, learn from them, extend love, curiosity, and forgiveness.

This is a profound journey, and a life long one: to become evermore awake to the dimensions of our whole self.  Then, we can join Scrooge in exuberant generosity, fully able to discern what, and to whom to give our love and energy.

As November approaches, I find myself reflecting on the nature of power: who seeks it, where the desire for power comes from, and what is “personal power”?

What of people who see themselves as “power-less”?

Can we learn to claim a personal power cradled in self-worth that cannot be destroyed by others?

In his legendary work, Man’s Search for Meaning, Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote of his experience in the Nazi death camps. He discovered that those most likely to survive found a source of spiritual and personal power deep within themselves that even the greatest evil could not destroy

The ancient Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah, articulated that value and meaning come into the world as opposites. Our world and our human psyche, are subject to a continual process of fragmentation and restoration.  In the unifying of these forces, healing and goodness emerge.

Carl Jung echoes this theme in his construct of the “tension of the opposites”, for example, Power and Love.  According to the Kabbalah, when these are torn asunder, evil flourishes. Viktor Frankl experienced this in Nazi Germany. We see it anew in Syria, and other places around the world.

In a more intimate arena, we see it every day in our own lives. How often do we succumb to an unconscious moment that splits power and love: when we break in front of someone in a grocery line, putting our own small-ego needs above respect for others; when we yell at a child because we cannot summon the patience to listen to what she really needs; when we refuse to visit a dying relative because it would disrupt our ambitious lives.

Another critical aspect of healing this split is learning to assert your power with others. When you refuse to surrender to the role of a victim, it is an act of self love.  When you appropriately assert your needs, values, or opinions , your inner power unites with self love.

This is a profound journey for many of us. It is especially challenging to learn to love yourself if you were not sufficiently loved as a child.

But, it is possible to achieve the most powerful kingdom: your self.

As we enter the month of October, it is a marvelous time to reap the bounties of the harvest, in our outer world, and within.  As we head off to the pumpkin patch or the apple-pressing party, we can reflect on the approaching winter as an invitation to hibernate, to reflect, to stoke the fires of our inner being.

A tool that can ignite this process is one that I call “Imaginal Meditation”. Paying homage to the meditation tradition of Buddhism and the Active Imagination of Carl Jung, it provides an opportunity to shape an image that meets the unique needs of the individual on any given morning,  at any given moment in time.

How to begin?

Attend to the breath. Ideally, this would be a private, silent place,  far from the distractions of modern life. Practically, this is not only un- achievable, it is often in the chaotic moments in life that we most need to take a moment to connect with powerful, supportive voices within.  These “voices” come from a cast of archetypal energies that can often be more accessible to us if we imagine them as distinct personalities who can provide us with support, strength, or emotional nourishment, permission to retreat and reflect before making a difficult decision: whatever you need at the time.

Say you are standing in line at the grocery store, snarled in traffic, waiting to go into a job interview – take a moment. Attend to your breath. Feel your lungs expand. Feel your rib cage relax as the breath moves out.

Allow a few moments, being aware of your body, breathing in, breathing out..

Become aware of your inner state: tensions, feelings, questions, hopes, apprehensions, fears, doubts…

Ask yourself: What do I need in this moment, and who do I need it from?

Open your imagination. Do you need support and comfort from your inner Wise Mother? Strength to accomplish a difficult task from your inner Body Builder? Inspiration from an inner Mozart? The possibilities are as expansive as your imagination.

Recently I had to deliver a lecture on IMAGINATION AND THE SOUL. It was a new experience for me, and I was nervous as I could be. A perfect time for me to practice what I was about to preach! I took a moment in my car, the parking lot of the lecture hall, noticed my breath, and pictured a closed door. I asked, “Who do I need to come through that door, to get me through this evening?”

I continued to monitor my breath. I imagined the door opening. Out came a tall, slender, strong woman, a long bow in her hand, a quiver of arrows on her back, thick dread-locks that snarled like snakes! But she was no Medusa, though I thought I could see a serpent’s tale! She had a face of ultimate serenity, and a warrior’s readiness to deal with whatever came. The reptilian quality seemed to promote the feeling of a steely confidence, a cold-bloodedness, no room for a little furry mammal’s whining and insecurity.

She “followed” me into the lecture hall, and I felt her energy sinking into my bones, as I prepared to deal with whatever came that night.

I also realized that my new Amazonian companion emerged to help with a challenge much deeper than lecture night jitters. I have a close family member newly diagnosed with cancer. I need to call on an emotional strength to walk with him through the darkest times, while holding hope and energy for joy,  I am grateful to the image-maker in my mind for awakening this new archetypal dimension when I need Her the most.

Also, I have learned that when you open your imagination, you never know what form it will take. It can be scary. The imaginal world of our unconscious is far from predictable. If a dark image emerges, it can be like a nightmare that comes in a dream: an invitation to turn and face the fear, to call forth an archetypal warrior to stand down the “monster”, and work through the complexity it presents. Often it is through confronting the darkness in ourselves that we own all the split off, unattractive, weak, flawed parts, and become more whole, more alive, more deeply human.

I invite you to engage in Imaginal Meditation, as we celebrate the harvest, and look forward to the warm hearth of a creative winter.

How does one approach the art of reading a play? The modern psyche is so attuned to visual media, it may seem daunting to create your own “inner movie” when you pick up the text of a play or screenplay. Unlike a novel, the narrative is created to come alive in visual form. But this is a golden opportunity for the reader to ignite his/her own imagination.

You can direct your own production, inside the limitless resources of your own mind! For example, the opening scene of my play OUT OF THE SHADOWS: A STORY OF TONI WOLFF AND EMMA JUNG, takes place in a garden. You can draw on every garden you have even seen, or watered, or imagined. The garden on Jung’s estate can become an archetypal garden, as Toni Wolff steps into it, “in the moist summer of 1910”. If you’d like a jump-start in using your imagination, you can go to You Tube, and view the first seven minutes of OUT OF THE SHADOWS at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tlfer2gtWI

While it is important to read the stage directions, so you can picture where the scene unfolds, a play is largely dialog.  OUT OF THE SHADOWS uses monolog to create the character of Carl Jung as seen by each of the women, though the living presence of the man never appears on stage. The reader can create a multi-faceted Jung in his/her imagination, as he emerges in the play from the different perspectives of his wife, and his colleague and great love.

It can also be fun and rewarding to read the dialog out loud, or, ideally, with another person playing the other part. The original production of OUT OF THE SHADOWS employed classical music in transitions from one scene to another. Imagining the resonant tones of Finzi, Shostakovitch, Ravel, or your own favorite composer, could enhance the reading. Better still, play classical music as you read the play.

You can also pour yourself a cup of tea, curl up in your favorite chair, and fire up your mind’s image-making, emotion-making, and intellectual curiosity.

Whatever approach you choose, in reading OUT OF THE SHADOWS, or any other play or screenplay, I commend you to use it as a way to develop, appreciate, and enhance the vast inner resources of your  imaginal mind.

I am also proud to announce that my OUT OF THE SHADOWS is the September selection for the on-line book club of the Depth Psychology Alliance, an online association of people all over the world intrigued by the study of Jungian, and other forms of depth psychology.  If you are interested in signing up for the book club, go to www.DepthPsychologyAlliance.com and follow the prompts to enroll in the book club. Also, you can listen to a radio interview on the play with myself and Depth Psychology Alliance director, Bonnie Bright by going to the link http://www.depthinsights.com/pages/radio.htm#clark-stern

Book Review of Kenneth A. Kimmel’s EROS AND THE SHATTERING GAZE: TRANSCENDING NARCISSISM. Fisher King Press, 2011 order through www.fisherkingpress.com or on Amazon

By Elizabeth Clark-Stern

What a feast for the mind, to encounter Kenneth Kimmel’s timely book. I was in the airport this past May, and saw the cover of Newsweek. A quite innocent-looking baby pig stared out at the camera. The title: What Makes Men Act Like Pigs. I bought the issue, and kicked myself when the contents provided no substantive analysis. I was hungry for an exploration beyond a re-cap of the public behaviors of famous men. I also wanted a narrative that offered a larger vision of the historic human malady of the narcissistic male.

EROS AND THE SHATTERING GAZE is that book.

Kimmel takes us on a sumptuous journey, using the vibrant medium of myth, movies, clinical vignettes, and contemporary portraits of such luminaries as Carl Jung and Bill Clinton, both of whom struggled with their own narcissism. Down, down we go into the shattered self that begins at the doorstep of the wounded mother-son relationship.

And yet, this is no linear Oedipal tale.  The beauty of Kimmel’s approach is its multi-dimensionality. I found myself reading the book as if entering a series of caves or tunnels connecting to vitally diverse castles, shaman’s huts, or suburban houses above ground. Just as I thought I had come upon a “definitive” theory, a new chamber would open, and an unconsidered perspective enriched all that had gone before.

Kimmel does give us candles, even brilliant flood lamps, to light our way. He achieves true innovation in mirroring the diverse theories of Carl Jung and Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This gives us a new way to interpret the ancient, destructive mother complex, and see how this plays out in the development of the under-seen male.

As I descended deeper in the journey, I was realized how profoundly I was relating to this material, not only as a scholar or psychotherapist, but as a woman. How mystifying it is, for so many of my sex, to encounter the withdrawn heart, depression, and dependency of the narcissistic male, so often wrapped in such a charming, intelligent, and charismatic package. The narrative peels away the initial reflection, “what was wrong with him?” revealing to the female reader, “What was wrong with me that I chose such a man?

For women whose choices of a wounded narcissist lodge in the past, this journey is a revelation of the bones of that choice that undoubtedly resonate in the present. For women currently in a relationship with a man who is harming her, neglecting her, shaming her, or betraying her, EROS AND THE SHATTERED GAZE is an invaluable tool for seeing that the remedy lies not in the man, or in the stars, but in ourselves.

What allows the reader to gaze deeply into the mirror of her own soul? I credit Kimmel’s ability as a storyteller. How could I, as a woman, not identify with Psyche, mortal heroine who falls victim to the mother complex acted out at her expense between Eros and his mother, Aphrodite. The labors of Psyche correspond to the efforts of both men and women to complete the impossible task, to please Mother and earn the way to true love.

Kimmel explores the complexity and paradox of the search for other, offering diverse interpretations, from Nietzsche’s “tragic man”, to his own interpretation of the story of Jacob. I was most relieved to read the latter. In Kimmel’s model, the rigidity of narcissism must be shattered for the opening of the heart to true, un-idealized love, to follow. This can be a major event, such as the public humiliation experienced by a Strauss-Kahn, a heart attack, as with Jung and Bill Clinton, or the more gradual eggshell crack of analysis.

With the shattering comes an awakening to the true messiness and unpredictability of life and love. Nietzsche’s tragic man is the one who steps forward to build his sand castle of imperfect human love, knowing that the tidal wave of change and loss is inevitable. Levinas goes further to describe that once the delusions of narcissism are exposed, the man can find his worth, not in making everyone around him the Same, but in celebrating the other and placing them before himself.

This last phrase, “placing the other before self” took me aback. As a therapist I often support women in reclaiming a shattered self that was sacrificed to a projected all-powerful other. How could Levinas advise either partner in a relationship put the other above the self?

Happily, as soon as I felt my torch waiver, Kimmel offers illumination in the story of Jacob. In the book of Genesis, Jacob has come to Canaan to make peace with his brother. He is afraid his brother will kill him the next day for a great wrong Jacob did to him twenty years ago. That night he camps alone, and is ambushed by a powerful stranger, either an angel or a devil. What brilliance that the fable allows for reality of both! Wrestling with, and asserting oneself with the Shadow (the split-off negative aspect of our character)  is the necessary enemy we all need to struggle with hand-to hand, for integration of the soul. At dawn, after a full night of wrestling, Jacob is blessed by the angel. He must become whole before he can kneel before his estranged brother and say, “I am here.” As so it is in the relations of romantic love. For men, and for women, once we deeply embrace our imperfect completeness, there is no loss of self in this surrender.

Is this not what we all long for, to kneel before a compassionate beloved and say, “I am here.”?

How tempted I am to send a copy of EROS to Andrew Weiner, John Edwards, and all the rest. Copies should be placed in the foyer of every office in Washington D.C., and in the tribal headquarters of those African chiefs with so many wives. Narcissism, in all of its subtle and destructive forms, expresses the wounding of the ages. Surely, if the powerful could do the hard, comprehensive work required for wholeness, there would be no need for an enemy, in the form of a negative mother figure, or a mother country so different from our own.

EROS AND THE SHATTERING GAZE provides a welcome road map for men and women on the journey to the whole: a pearl tossed gracefully onto the violent shallows of our time.