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James Hollis QUOTES

James Hollis QUOTES

1 " Fear of our own depths is the enemy. "

― James Hollis , The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 59)

2 " One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. "

― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

3 " One of the bridges between sexes, to be sure, is sex. But men, too often feeling deficient in discourse, place too much emphasis on intercourse. "

― James Hollis , Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

4 " Whatever sex is, and it is at least a profound mystery, is easily misused. The primary psychological purpose of sex for those men who spend their lives in the cold, cruel world, and whose relationship with their own anima is frigid, is to reconnect with a warm place. Sex is a form of emotional reassurance, a narcotic to still the pain of the bruised soul. If life batters them, then sex, like drugs or work, may numb the wound. The sexual act offers a momentary transcendence. Orgasm can be an ecstatic experience; for the moment one may feel outside the iron confines of ordinary consciousness. It is the closest many men ever come to a religious experience. Thus the act of sex may mask a desperate search for acceptance, underneath whiсh lurks the mother complex. "

― James Hollis , Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

5 " Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society. Again, before healing may begin, men must acknowledge the reality of what lies within. Among those confusing emotions is a deep grief for the loss of the personal father as companion, model and support, and a deep hunger for the fathers as a source of wisdom, solace and inspiration. "

― James Hollis , Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

6 " When men feel the wound that cannot heal, they either bury themselves in woman's arms and ask her for healing, which she cannot provide, or they hide themselves in macho pride and enforced loneliness. "

― James Hollis , Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

7 " Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics. "

― James Hollis , Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

8 " To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more homogenous culture than ours. As well, their interest lay not in the individuation of the person but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world. "

― James Hollis , Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

9 " How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither? "

― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

10 " The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves. "

― James Hollis , The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 59)

11 " The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego. "

― James Hollis , The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 59)

12 " Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others. "

― James Hollis , Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

13 " To become a person does not necessarily mean to be well adjusted, well adapted, approved of by others. It means to become who you are. We are meant to become more eccentric, more peculiar, more odd. We are not meant just to fit in. We are here to be different. We are here to be the individual. "

― James Hollis , Through the Dark Wood: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

14 " Where do you refuse to grow up, wait for certainty of wisdom before choosing, hope for solutions to emerge fully formed, expect rescue, or wait for a guru to make sense of it all for you? "

― James Hollis , On This Journey We Call Our Life: Living the Questions (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 103)

15 " Underlying symptoms that typify the Midlife Passage is the assumption that we shall be saved by finding and connecting with someone or something new in the outer world. Alas, for the drowning midlife sailor there are no such life preservers. We are in the sea-surge of the soul, along with many others to be sure, but needing to swim under our own power. The truth is simply that what we must know will come from within. If we can align our lives with that truth, no matter how difficult the abrasions of the world, we will feel healing, hope and new life. The experience of early childhood, and later of our culture, alienated us from ourselves. We can only get back on course by reconnecting with our inner truths. "

― James Hollis

16 " … but she herself embodies their greatest, most therapeutic gift: the message that we are here to be here, to go through it all and to retain our dignity, purpose, and values as best we can. "

― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

17 " These four questions that never go away are:

1. Why are we here, in service to what, and toward what end? (the cosmological question)
2. How are we as animal forms, empowered with spirit, to live in harmony with our natural environment? (the ecological question)
3. Who are my people, what is my duty to others, and what are rights and duties, privileges, and expectations of my tribe? (the sociological question)
4. Who am I, how am I different from others, what is my life about, and how am I to find my way through the difficulties of live? (the psychological question) "

― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

18 " These four questions that never go away are:

Why are we here, in service to what, and toward what end? (the cosmological question)/li>
How are we as animal forms, empowered with spirit, to live in harmony with our natural environment? (the ecological question)
Who are my people, what is my duty to others, and what are rights and duties, privileges, and expectations of my tribe? (the sociological question)
Who am I, how am I different from others, what is my life about, and how am I to find my way through the difficulties of live? (the psychological question)
106 "

― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

19 " Where am I asking others to take responsibility for my life? Let's face it - we would all love to be taken care of. We all are recovering children who project the dynamics of intrapsychic parent onto an institution, an ideology ...Growing up is ever more difficult because it requires letting go of old expectations of rescue and redemption. We are it; this is it; this is as good as it gets, and we better deal with it. "

― James Hollis , Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 92)

20 " Either we die unto who we were, in order to move to the next stage, or we die through staying stuck, and suffer stasis and stultification. "

― James Hollis