Back to Basics

By: Ann Ulanov

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Created during the threat of worldwide pandemic, this book reaches to new language to express the basics of Analytical Psychology in new forms. What results is not a finished conclusion but a never ending process that includes dismay and celebration. Bad and good interweave as long as we are growing; celebration happens in perceiving the infinite is lived through our ordinary finite life. Projection is a first step toward consciousness; the missing piece that lures us to destructiveness can be found.

A defense of dissociation presses for its undoing to support a consciousness that simultaneously can hold in mind the absence along with the presence of our life force. Integration is agonizing as well as liberating. The new syntax of what the psyche is doing with and to us yields increased permeability of personal and collective living marked by a subjectivity within the objective other-than-self endorsing full fledged living of self. That cannot be done without tender regard for neighbor within and without, and forms of service to the transcendent.

Ann Belford Ulanov, M.Div., Ph.D., L.H.D., is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion, Emerita, at Union Theological Seminary, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and a member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. She is the author of many books, her most recent including: Madness and Creativity (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology, 2013); The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness and Deadness in the Self (2007); Spirit in Jung (2005); Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work (2004); and Attacked by Poison Ivy, A Psychological Study (2002). She is the co-author, with her late husband Barry Ulanov, of Religion and the Unconscious; Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer; Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying; The Witch and The Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality; The Healing Imagination; and Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus.