Review by Lyn Cowan.
Every once in a rare while a book comes into one's hands that is so satisfying that it's hard to write about it without drenching every sentence in superlatives. This is such a book. So I am exercising as much self-restraint as I can so as not to destroy my credibility ("Oh, it can't be that good!"), and I will try to harness my passion for the excellent writing and a fluid style that glides the eye right along the pages of this book. I have long believed that style - the manner in which one presents oneself, either verbally, or in fashion, or gesture - is much deeper than a superficial socially-constructed persona: style is substance, the package which carries the content, and the content is not separate from the package. Paris's jargon-free language invites us to look into the windows of her agile mind without making us feel intrusive. She writes personally but not confessionally, is emphatic but not dogmatic in her positions, and speaks to us with controlled passion and dry, sparkling wit.
There are weaknesses in this book - every book must have some. The subtitle ("Depth Psychology after Neuroscience") is somewhat misleading, as there is not as much about neuroscience as one would expect. The chapter titled "Brother Philosophy, Sister Psychology" could have been tighter; though interesting, it still felt too digressive. There were some lines here and there that didn't sit quite right, but my memory traces of them are too faint to note. In my view, the book's few shortcomings pale beside the richness and quality of thought that characterizes nearly all of Paris's work, and so they kept slipping out of my mind. Readers of Wisdom of the Psyche will have to find their own complaints.
The first chapter is titled, "Denting My Thick Skull," in which Paris sets the personal context and then describes her horrific fall into an empty concrete swimming pool in New Mexico, the life-threatening brain injury that resulted, and her recovery. This by itself is an amazing account, told from within that inert body as Paris notes the unexpected, frightening, unintelligible and often achingly beautiful events that are transpiring within and around her.
Like a wounded bull collapsing in the ring, I feel myself dying. It is just as well, for my heart is already dead. Soon there will be no body to suffer the failure of love. Pain, all modalities of pain, would all be over if I let this fragile bird or butterfly the Greeks called "soul" take flight. I shut my eyes and fall into a deep hypnagogic state where I seem to hallucinate a diaphanous butterfly hovering over my head like a minuscule parachute that might be able to carry away my soul. I am awake, yet this fantasy has the reality that images have in dreams, as if dreams are oozing through my injured brain. (p. 3)
Death becomes attractive, seductive; but life, the bull, is not ready to release its hold. From within her "cracked head" Paris observes that chaos can be freeing.
The chaos of physical pain is breaking me open, like cracks in the wall that let the light in. Strapped to my bed, there is nothing I can do. I can only be. I feel a sublime surrender to the bruising, cleasing process of destruction. The person that I was, and could not tolerate being, is being killed. I find repose in this destruction.
It is what happens between injury and recovery that makes a most compelling story, and a most unusual one: not only were the odds very much against her living at all, but we don't often have such a deep, lucid, personal, moving, insightful, and wise account of that happening. And the rest of the book is an unfolding of some of the most important lessons that came out of that experience. So the chapter title is in a sense a metaphor all of us share in - we all have thick skulls about a lot of things that could use denting. One of the pleasures of reading Paris's book is that she takes us from the personal to the collective and back again, and she can do this because she is firmly anchored in the reality of the psyche, and its wisdom is not hers alone but belongs to all of us.
The book has a circular structure, moving from the inside of Paris's injured brain to the outside world, and returns to the inside again in a final chapter, examining the experience of pervasive anxiety we all feel, and - what may come as a surprise - anxiety's antidote: joy. In between, Paris's practiced hand moves surely (not heavily) among philosophy, depth and social psychology, feminism, mythology, and clinical psychotherapeutic practice, weaving a tapestry of related ideas that are good, useful, and interesting ideas, necessary ideas. They come alive not only because they are informed by Paris's extensive range of academic knowledge, but because they speak to and for a deep appreciation for life in all its complexities and varieties, and with a voice made sure and purposeful by having been so nearly permanently silenced.

While many Jungian authors have critiqued and criticized mainstream psychology, and while many of the ideas in this book are not especially original, Paris presents them with freshness and accessibility that I hope will give these ideas wider dissemination among clinicians, academics, and a general readership. Paris is one of the most concise and articulate observer/critics of the culture in general and psychology in general, and one of the few who offers a corrective vision, and a wider one: we are encouraged to look to other discplines to understand our own.
Readers of Paris's earlier books, Pagan Meditations (1986) and especially Pagan Grace (1990), are already familiar with Paris's consummate ability to make mythic figures visible in the usually-unnoticed patterns of individual and collective life, and to give us artful and immediate observations of how we are all affected by social movements such as feminism and New Age fluffings. In Wisdom of the Psyche Paris is at her best, bringing all her formidable intellectual force to bear with the same dexterity of language as before. But this book has something more, born as it is from a life that completely changed in an instant in that fateful fall. I felt a warmth in this book (unusual given its subject), an approachability to the author, and a deep well of compassion, even while Paris wields her pen like a sword to cut through some of our illusions and most cherished ideas and theories - which, as often happens, sometimes turn out to be little more than store-bought prejudices. And Paris has a wonderful sense of humor which complements rather than undermines her great love of ideas and life itself.

Paris examines the philosophy and practice of psychotherapy in a variety of models: the medical model, the economic model, the legal model. And in a powerful chapter she dispels the idea of "therapy as redemption." Given the contemporary American preoccupation with and prejudices about religion, and what seems to be a growing insistence on "faith and values" in every arena, from pulpit to politics, Paris demonstrates that psychotherapy is most effective and true to the nature of the psyche when it does not offer redemption from suffering, pain, and damnation. And it should be noted that the focus on "healing," predicated as it is on conventional medical-model ideas of "normality" and "abnormality," is at best a misleading notion, often confused with religiosity or spiritual "growth," and may work against the psyche's natural desire to deepen and know itself. "The attempt to `fix a soul,'" Paris writes (p. 25), "diminishes life, it harms the psyche, it dries up the seed of wisdom."

In addition to many examples from Paris's own life, she gives us brief vignettes in each chapter that effectively, and often affectively, illuminate the point she is making. These vignettes are the stories - I will not call them "cases" - of real people with whom Paris has worked therapeutically - I will not say "clinically" - and they each carry a seed of wisdom of the psyche.

In what I felt was the strongest (that is, personally most exhilerating) chapter of the book, "Boundary Issues: `You, science. Me, humanities.'", Paris puts forth a resonant differentiation between depth psychology, which belongs to the humanities, and the medical and biological sciences. By such differentiation each field receives its due and is valued, and we are liberated from impossible hopes and expectations that psychotherapy, masquerading as a quasi-medical procedure, will deliver us from evil, and that medicine, masquerading as the final answer to impossible questions, will deliver us from death. In this chapter, woven through with references to Paris's own near-fatal fall, she always defends the rich complexity of psychic life and the sustaining mystery of human emotion.

Psychological wisdom is the goal of an analysis. If wisdom is replaced by formulaic diagnoses and inflexible treatment plans, the quality of presence is lost. There is among young psychologists fresh out of school an optimism, an innocence, a naivety, and an inflation that is one of the results of an overly technical training. They are led to "believe" in their theories. They are taught to approach psychological suffering through all sorts of theoretical grids, processing all human emotions and life's complications as "problems" that this or that theory can solve. All the stories they hear go into a theoretical blender and come out in the form of a slush of "should" and "should not." Just as we have the techno-optimists, who believe that new technologies will bring the planet together, we have the psycho-optimists who believe that loss, angst, heartbreak, love triangles, fear of pleasure, fear of freedom, fear of life's adventure are all wounds that can be healed with the proper techniques. (p. 90)

These are strong words but not heartless polemic. Paris might also be speaking of clinicians who have been practicing for years: we all run the risk of ideological entrenchment and of dispelling doubt about our effectiveness by holding fast to old ideas and theories we suspect may not be as true as we once "believed." I found the tone of the book throughout that of a provocateur who entices into discussion with a smile, and this was one reason (among many) I found it so intellectually satisfying. Paris doesn't constellate counter-argument in the reader so much as she constellates a self-questioning attitude. I found myself asking what I really think about the ideas she introduces rather than wanting to argue against her. And this, I think, is just the sort of attitude that makes not only for pleasurable reading, but keeps us in that cloudy area of self-reflection and receptivity to our own doubts, just that inner space where we live with uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. Indeed, all these uncertainties and ambiguities are where most of us live most of the time, but where we also most immediatley experience the reality of psychic life. And this is where we are most likely to stumble into some new way of thinking, some new creative jolt that helps us lurch into a new attitude and out of old conventional thinking. "Life is generous," writes Paris, "it gives you one body but many selves." (p. 129)
And this book is generous too, as the author opens some of her many selves to speak passionately to us about, and with, the wisdom of the psyche.

Lyn Cowan is a Jungian analyst practicing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has served as Director of Training and then as President of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. She is the author of Tracking the White Rabbit: A Subversive View of Modern Culture and Masochism: A Jungian View. This review was written for the members of the International Association of Jungian Studies.