Unholy Hungers : Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves and Others
Submitted by WorkCreatively on Fri, 11/13/2009 - 08:46
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Printer-friendly version| Title | Unholy Hungers : Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves and Others |
| Publication Type | Book |
| Pub Year | 1996 |
| Authors | Hort, B. E. |
| Publisher | Shambhala |
| Keywords | compassion, hubris, myth, psychic vampirism, reinvention |
| Notes |
hubris"We, too, try to emulate the gods, but unlike the Greeks, we seem dangerously ignorant of the peril of hubris. Not that we blindly aspire to godhood from stupidity or arrogance; rather, we aspire to godhood because the modern demigods we revere are themselves mortal, so we quite reasonably feel their enviable fate might just as well be our own. What's more, celebrity in our culture is supposed to be available to all who have the guts to seek it, which implies that those who do not attain it are somehow deficient in the skills of self-reinvention" compassion"In our external lives, we can ignite the soul-connecting flame whenever we speak sincere words of compassion and love. These words may sound like: 'I know you are angry about the loss of your job, and I know you don't mean to hurt anyone else. Still, our children are frightened by your loud voice. They think they are responsible for your pain.' " (p. 246) psychic vampirism"If Jung was right, then the vampire myth is much more than a byproduct of biological ignorance, sexual perversity, and a pathological taste for the macabre. The vampire's presence in lore from around the world and across the ages indicates, in the Jungian view, that the vampire archetype has haunted the human psyche since the dawn of history. Wherever we have lived, whenever we have lived, the vampire has always been with us, and with us in the most intimate way of all--psychically. Because archetypes are simply the metaphors we use to think about different qualities of psychic energy, the myth of the vampire is merely a shape that we have developed to describe a particular kind of psychic experience. We may have been psychically drained or infected by a vampiric person, but no individual is the archetype itself." (p. 6) |
| URL | http://books.google.com/books?id=iBwTAQAAMAAJ |