Quotes from James Hollis

As Jung pointed out, our ancestors believed in gods; we believe in vitamins—both invisible.

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.

Since so many of us are living so much longer, may we inquire if longevity itself is the goal, or is it something else? Are our lives four times richer, more meaningful, than those who lived in ancient Greece

Nothing human is alien to me." But can that be true? Surely the I that I know and treasure, the I that I present to you, is free of the darker sides of human conduct.

Who I am, who you are, is the gift.

The new myth will not come from above. Only totalitarian ideologies, or ego-crafted appeals to our complexes, will appear in such fashion.

It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience. A spiritual tradition that is only received from history or from family makes no real difference in a person's life, for he or she is living by conditioned reflexive response. Only what is experientially true is worthy of a mature spirituality.

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.

And thus fourthly, it only stands to reason, that the best thing we can do for ourselves and for the other is to assume more of the developmental agenda for ourselves.

The angst-driven search for external authority through fundamentalism is a flight from personal growth and development, an abdication of the summons to individual life.

even the most devout creationist today will not walk into an emergency room and insist that he or she be given "only the treatment available to Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed, and of course, don't bother with that anesthetic stuff. And, while I am here, why not trepan my brain and let those evil spirits out?

Generally speaking, people are drawn toward intimate relationships either because they are opposites who will compensate each other, or because they are complementary, which means that not only their conscious likes and dislikes line up, but their complexes as well.

How difficult is it for us to change our stories by taking "counter-phobic steps" as correctives? How often do we see someone's life devoted to compliance, hoping to curry favor and avoid retribution? How often do we see someone repeatedly miring themselves in bad relationships, hoping to wrest love, security, affirmation at last?

We all live with expensive ghosts in memory's unmade bed, for what we do not remember remembers us nonetheless

It is only when we welcome such spirits and give them entrance that they may reveal themselves to us. When we open to ask what comes to us, why it has come, we may grow and be enlarged by the dialogue that emerges. When we deny them entrance, they do not go away. They go underground, persist, perseverate, and prevail.

The child's experience of the mother is internalized as a complex; an emotionally charged cluster of energy beyond the control of the ego.

Whatever shaky throne we purchased at the price of numerous adjustments and backroom deals is our presumptive treasure and our sanctum.

for what we have most to share with them is not our learning or our techniques, but rather who we have become and what darkness we have faced in the world and in ourselves.

Solitude can be defined as learning that we are not alone when we are alone. When we have achieved the stature of solitude, namely achieving a conscious relationship with ourselves, then we are freer to share ourselves with others, freer to receive their gifts in return and not be infantilized by the mutual archaic agenda of childhood, the agenda that covertly uses the other to provide for us.

This archetypal drama is renewed every day, in every generation, in every institution, and in every decisive moment of personal life. Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.

Life hurts, and sometimes it hurts a great deal. We are extraordinarily flexible, possess genetic programming to survive, even prevail, and we gain resilience as we age, and yet we still hurt easily.

How do we know what is right for us? Well, the body knows, our deepest feeling knows, and the psyche knows, and each expresses its opinion, even as we learned early in life to evade these continuous messages from our own depths. So, the recovery effort must typically begin with the experience of inner discord, outer conflict, and sometimes heartache and loss.

Psychiatry today is less a psychotherapeutic enterprise than a pharmacological crapshoot

enough. Thus it is owned, possessed, directed by that which it does not know.