Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

James Hollis
Independent study
Online

Overview

-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?

In Hauntings, James Hollis considers how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms (spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries) that move through us, and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come.

  1. Analyze the powers of the past to interfere with, and usurp the goals and intentions of the patient in the present.
  2. Explain the importance of the concept of the complex, and the ubiquitous role it plays in both personal and societal agendas.
  3. Discuss the capacity to discern the presence of historically charged clusters within the therapist and client and to enable both to take them on more consciously.
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