Chiron Publications Blog
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Dr. Murray Stein’s prolific career has produced a substantial body of writings, lectures, and interviews. His writings, captured in these volumes, span a wide domain of topics that include writings on Christianity, Individuation, Mid-life, the practice of Analytical Psychology, and topics in contemporary society. His deep understanding of Analytical Psychology is much more than an academic discourse, but rather a deeply personal study of Jung that spans nearly half a century.
Now Available in Paperback: Aurora Consurgens, Volume 7 Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz
Saint Perpetua was a young Christian woman put to death in 203 AD in the Roman arena at the age of 22. Her profound visions occurred days before her death. Von Franz penetrates these images, suggesting they were revelations of a new, Christian God-image breaking through from the collective unconscious into the animus of young Perpetua.
Marie-Louise von Franz is at her very best as she unravels the mysteries held within the visions of these two saints.
Volume 3 turns to the Maiden’s Quest within fairytales.
The maiden/heroine navigates a complicated maze of inner and outer relationships as she builds a bridge to the unconscious. The heroine contends with the animus in many forms like a devouring and incestuous father, demonic groom, the beautiful prince, an androgenous mother, a cold dark tower, and through conflict with the evil stepmother.
Dangers and pitfalls await her as the conscious feminine strives to make connections with the unconscious masculine. The maiden is the undeveloped feminine and the promised fruit of her struggle with the animus is the coniunctio. Volume 3 is a masterwork of cross-cultural scholarship, penetrating psychological insight, and a strikingly illuminating treatise. With her usual perspicacity and thoroughness, von Franz gathers countless fairytale motifs revealing a myriad of facets to the maiden’s quest.
Von Franz’s prodigious knowledge of fairytales from around the world demonstrates that the fairytale draws its root moisture from the collective realm. This volume continues where Volume 1 left off as von Franz describes the fairytale, “suspended between the divine and the secular worlds (…) creating a mysterious and pregnant tension that requires extreme power to withstand.” The resistance of the great mother against the hero and his humble origins, as well as the hero freeing the anima figure from the clutches of the unconscious are universal archetypal patterns. The spoils retrieved by the hero symbolize new levels of consciousness wrested from the unconscious.
Susan Rowland’s The Sacred Well Murders…
A simple job turns deadly when Mary Wandwalker, novice detective, is hired to chaperone a young American, Rhiannon, to the Oxford University Summer School on the ancient Celts. Worried by a rhetoric of blood sacrifice, Mary and her operatives, Caroline, and Anna, attend a sacrifice at a sacred well. They discover that those who fail to individuate their gods become possessed by them.
For the so-called Reborn Celts, who run the summer school, have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Could their immersion in myth be less a symbol for psychic wholeness and more a clue of their intent to engage in terrorist violence? Who better to penetrate their secret rites than an apparently harmless woman of a certain age?
Mary agrees to spy on the Reborn Celts, then learns, to her horror, of Anna’s passionate affair with the chief suspect, Joe Griffith. With Griffith also the object of Rhiannon’s obsession, Mary realizes too late that that these 21st century Celts mean murder.
The Reborn Celts draw Mary and her friends into three rites to summon their gods: at an Oxford sacred well, by the Thames on the way to London, and in Celtic London, where bloodshed will restore one of the Thames’ “lost rivers.”
Before the fatal night of the summer solstice, Caroline and Anna race to London seeking Mary, who has been kidnapped. Will she end as the crone sacrifice? Or will the three women re-make their detecting family, so re-constituting a pattern of archetypal feminine compassion?
Dream Paradise, Here We Come: How to Create Powerful Intentions for Conscious Dreaming Activities
Murray Stein shares timeless lectures in The Bible as Dream: A Jungian Interpretation
In The Bible as Dream, Murray Stein shares important themes and images in the biblical narrative that from a psychological perspective, stand out as essential features of the meaning of the Bible for the modern reader.
The Bible presents a world elaborated with reference to a specific God image. As the mythographer Karl Kerenyi puts it in writing about the Greek gods and goddesses, every god and every goddess constitutes a world. So it is too with the biblical God, whose name Stein exceptionally capitalizes throughout out of cultural respect.
The biblical world is the visionary product of a particular people, the ancient Hebrews and the early Christians, who delved deeply into their God image and pulled from it the multitude of perspectives, rules for life, spiritual practices, and practical implications that all together created the tapestry that we find depicted in the canonical Bible. Yahweh is the heart and soul of this world, its creator, sustainer, and destroyer. The Bible is a dream that tells the story of how this world was brought into being in space and time and what it means.
Don’t miss these timeless lectures – a work of respectful and loving interpretation.
Murray Stein, Ph.D., studied at Yale University (B.A. in English) and attended graduate student at Yale Divinity School (M.Div.) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. in Religion and Psychological Studies). He trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich.
Violence and Women: Exploring the Medea Myth
When the archetypal patriarchal or matriarchal dominate in a daughter’s psyche, the positive masculine spirit does not mature sufficiently out of the maternal unconscious for there to be an optimal meeting between feminine and masculine principles. It becomes difficult for a more conscious, well-integrated, whole human being to develop. Where inadequate or incompetent fathering is combined with absent or passive, silent mothering, the balance is off; a daughter’s talents and possibilities for the future can remain dormant—or fade away in self-doubt.
These analytical discussions of two plays, The Heiress and A Delicate Balance, demonstrate how too much or too little parenting can have this detrimental effect. Particularly, when a father withdraws from the family and does not give loving attention to his daughter, or when he presents himself as an overbearing elder, he is neglecting to support his child in the natural process of separation from the mother/Mother—not helping her achieve personal autonomy and an individual life of her own. As an adult, such a daughter will likely find herself in a place not directed from within by her unique potential for wholeness, but rather in one dictated by the limiting expectations of her family and the collective patriarchal culture around her.
Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection
Drawing on early Christianity, medieval alchemy, depth psychology, and the myths of “The Flying Dutchman” and “The Once and Future King,” he also explores the subjects of loneliness, fundamentalist religion, and the spiritual dimensions of psychology.
“The healing power of Robert’s writing is palpable,”
-Marion Woodman
“Robert Johnson’s work always has that naked intensity that tells you you’re in the psychic house of an honest man.”
– Robert Bly
Robert A. Johnson was more than an international best-selling author of fifteen books, brilliant and influential Jungian analyst, and acclaimed international lecturer; he was a master storyteller. This collection, compiled and edited by Nonnie Cullipher, is transcribed from Robert’s own tellings throughout the years.
Robert told these stories, his favorites, to an appreciative and revering community each night at Journey into Wholeness events from 1981 to 2001.
Robert collected several of these stories in his beloved India, but the book includes stories and myths from Chinese, Native American, Mexican, and European traditions. Each story is introduced by a colleague, mentee, or friend whose life was profoundly changed by the presence and teachings of this wise and other-wordly sage.
November Book Spotlight!
Have you ever awakened from a dream that left you feeling stunned—a dream so vivid or impactful—so unexpected—that it changes your life from that point forward? Imagine you could ask a question of a dream character, or the dream itself, and watch as a profoundly surprising response appears. Suppose you could take action in your dream to eliminate a recurring nightmare, heal a relationship, or even a physical ailment. The 100 dreamers in this book have!
These are what might be called big dreams, stories of life changing guidance, insight and healing; some that reach beyond the senses and even beyond death.
Manisha Roy shares her love of writing in this collection of over 20 short stories.
The stories of this collection were written over a span of several decades beginning in 1985 and ending in 2022. A few of them were translated by Manisha Roy from her mother tongue, Bengali. Despite the geographical and other contextual differences, the narrative shifted and at times translated itself as if the author traveled easily between different landscapes—both external and internal.
Jungian analyst Eve Maram’s The Schizophrenia Complex focuses on the thoughts and feelings constellated by encounters with what we call schizophrenia, for those who experience symptoms, and for those others impacted by them. To do so, Dr. Maram had to face her own fear, denial, resistance, and ultimate not knowing. The events inspiring her were beyond her control and rearranged her life without her permission.
Chiron Publications is honored to publish the newly translated volumes of the Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz, one of the most renowned authorities on fairytales.
Aurora Consurgens, the rising sun, is a vision forged in the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition that became a cornerstone of medieval Church doctrine and the centerpiece of the Dominican and Franciscan traditions. While its authorship has been shrouded in mystery and controversy, Marie Louise von Franz furnishes ample evidence that this was a final work of Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church. His vision begins with an anima figure of the Sapentia Dei.
This medieval alchemical text is rich in symbolism and offers a glimpse into how unconscious contents can be understood through their interactions with the material world. Marie Louise von Franz places Aurora Consurgens squarely in the tradition of visionary spiritual writings similar to the visions of Hildegard von Bingen or John of Patmos. Aquinas’s visions and his final commentary on the Song of Songs appear to have been the result of a state of ecstasy into which he fell just before his death. Marie Louise von Franz excavates a psychological treasure from his work.
Like Berlin, we all have a wall, an inner wall, that needs to be torn down. It’s a wall we built at a young age, when socialization began and we needed a barrier behind which we could hide that part of ourselves that was unacceptable to our mothers as well as important others. What we hide is the “shadow.” To conceal it, we create a wall that we call the “persona. “
To be a Berliner, is about starting out as a unified whole, as we all started out as infants, as Berlin itself started out. It is then to be split in two with a wall erected between the two parts, as Berlin was, and as we all were when socialization began, shattering our original wholeness.
Finally, it is to become one again, as Berlin has done and as we hope to do, if we do our work and if we are lucky. As in the case of Berlin, the wall keeps us from becoming all we can be. Berlin, thus, is a metaphor for the enlargement of personality that can occur when we, like Berlin’s inhabitants, tear down that wall and become bigger, richer, freer, and more diverse and democratic. In this sense, we are all potentially Berliners.
Verena Kast ́s Father-Daughter, Mother-Son was first published by Element Books in 1997. Since then, it has become a classic read for those adventuring into Carl Gustav Jung ́s concept of complexes-what they are, how they affect our life and shape our relationships- and for those wanting to understand more about the relationship between fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons-of whatever sex and gender.
This book is not only a must read for psychoanalysts and psychologists, but it is also comprehensible and very useful for those that have little knowledge about this field and those eager to know more about themselves.
This book is the first of the series titled Jungianeum: Re-Covered Classics in Analytical Psychology curated by Stefano Carpani.
Eastern Practices and Individuation: Essays by Jungian Analysts Edited by Leslie Stein
Are Eastern practices useful for psychological growth? Is psychoanalysis an aid on an Eastern path? Carl Gustav Jung had the realization of the existence of a center deep within our being, the Self, the discovery of which is the goal of individuation: the process of psychological development. Unable to find analogies to the Self in Christianity, he turned to Eastern religions, uncovering and finding a reflection of this miracle in Daoism and Hinduism, while also examining Buddhism and Sufism.
Eastern paths and their practices, such as meditation, mindfulness, and yoga, have been absorbed into Western culture. It is thus timely to approach the contemporary relevance of Eastern religions and practices to the Jungian path of individuation. These essays are personal, engaging, and contain a refined analysis of whether these two paths may work together or are pointing to different end points.
Contributors: Ashok Bedi, Lionel Corbett, Royce Froehlich, Karin Jironet, Patricia Katsky, Ann Chia-Yi Li, Jim Manganiello, Judith Pickering, Leslie Stein, Murray Stein, Polly Young-Eisendrath
Hauntings – Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons?
Are we here just to propagate the species anew?
Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die?
Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion?
What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies?
What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life?
hence the key word ‘toward.’ So this essay is rather a processing of memories that keep coming to the surface, apparently because there is some serious affect attached,” James Hollis, The Broken Mirror.
Prisms: Reflections on the Journey We Call Life summarizes a lifetime of observing, engaging, and exploring why we are here, in service to what, and what life asks of us. These eleven essays, all written recently, examine how we understand ourselves, and often we have to reframe that understanding, the nature and gift of comedy, the imagination, desire, as well as our encounters with narcissism, and aging.
Hollis explores the roadblocks we encounter and our on-going challenge to live our brief journey with as much courage, insight, and resolve as we can bring to the table.
