The first edition of Wisdom of the Psyche engaged with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. In this revised edition, Ginette Paris re-focuses her attention on the modern lack of desire to become adult and updates the book with brand new neuroscientific research.
Paris uses cogent and passionate argument, as well as stories from patients, to demonstrate that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. She makes clear that the way out of those destructive states does not start with an upward, positive, wilful effort of the ego, but with an opening of the imagination, and aims to foster the dialogue between psychotherapists and neuroscientists. In clear and accessible language, Paris describes how depth psychology can be seen as a subject of the humanities rather than the sciences, and explains how gaining an understanding of neuroscience will not necessarily make us psychologically wiser.
A unique and powerful book, Wisdom of the Psyche will be fascinating reading for Jungian and depth psychologists, psychotherapists, analysts and others in the helping professions, as well as students and those in training, and readers with an interest in psychology and neuroscience who want to create an inner life worth living.
“Emotionally personal, immediately useful, surprisingly original, beautifully deep, this page-turning read also turns the page into a new century of psychology. What an achievement.”
– James Hillman, former Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, author of Re-Visioning Psychology, The Soul’s Code, A Terrible Love of War.
Read More Reviews of Wisdom of the Psyche, Depth Psychology after Neuroscience
“Once again Ginette Paris demonstrates that she is quite simply the most original and eloquent of all writers on contemporary depth psychology.
This book is a brilliant and beautiful account of how a serious accident, a near-fatal brain injury, became not just a trauma but a rare and wonderful opportunity. After the concussion and coma, Paris did not just regain consciousness. She experienced a life-altering transformation that led her to delve below all the gray matter of the current, trendy fascination with neuroscience to explore the “deep psyche.”
In this book Paris invents an entirely new genre of psychological writing, one that combines intimately personal autobiography, humanely inspirational stories from patients, and radically imaginative theoretical proposals for the future of depth psychology.”
-Michael Vannoy Adams, Jungian Psychoanalyst
“Wisdom of the Psyche is the bright book of the future for everyone involved with depth psychology and its creative transformation of the arts and sciences. Ginette Paris’s stunning achievement is to combine autobiography, history of ideas, clinical originality, psychological theory and philosophical sophistication with the arts of a poet and novelist. Her book is at once lucid, erudite, a delightful companion, and a serious challenge to the academy and the consulting room. Paris gently and powerfully embeds depth psychology in the humanities, making Wisdom of the Psyche essential reading for the twenty-first century. We are all the richer for it.”
-Susan Rowland, Reader in English and Jungian Studies, University of Greenwich, UK