The Human Soul: Lost in Transition at the Dawn of a New Era - audio recording

with Dr. Erel Shalit

A Public Event on the Pacifica Institute Ladera Lane Campus, Barrett Center
Thursday, November 12th from 7:15 – 9:00 p.m.

An audio recording of the lecture is now available here, beginning with Joe Cambray's introduction.

The post-modern condition is characterized by a multitude of perspectives and narratives, challenging the view and the value of central, universal truths. The changes generated by this existential condition affect the individual as well as society, the experience of interiority as well as the perception of external reality. In cyberspace, the internal and the external sometimes converge, persona and shadow may merge, and the ego's sense of identity may become detached from its roots in the Self.

The lecture will present these developments, including the Transient Personality, who traverses time, space, narratives and a plenitude of faces at great ease, but does not stay in one place either in external reality, or within him- or herself.

Dr. Erel Shalit is a Jungian psychoanalyst in Tel Aviv. He is a past President of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology, founding Director of the Jungian Analytical Psychotherapy Program at Bar Ilan University, and past Director of the Shamai Davidson Community Mental Health Clinic, at the Shalvata Psychiatric Centre in Israel.

He is the author of several books, among them The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey; Enemy, Cripple & Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path; The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego; The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel, and the novella Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return; and with Nancy Swift Furlotti, he has edited The Dream and its Amplification. Dr. Erel Shalit is also the editor of Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif, a previously unpublished book by Erich Neumann, and Turbulent Times, Creative Minds - Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung in Relationship, co-edited with Murray Stein, as well as the author of a forthcoming book on The Human Soul in Transition, at the Dawn of a New Era.

Last spring Dr. Shalit chaired the Jung-Neumann Conference, April 24-26, 2015 in kibbutz Shefayim, Israel.

Erel Shalit - On Self and Meaning in the Cycle of Life

Cover Painting by Benjamin Shiff

An excerpt from The Cycle of Life (pp. 177-8)

In old age, hearing becomes impaired and vision more blurred. For some, this provides an opportunity to open the senses to the pulsation of the soul, to hear the echoes of the sounds that arise from the depths, and perceive the reflection of the patterns that take shape under the sea.

This may be the transparency and the invisibility of not being seen by others, and the fear of being run over by the phenomena, the appearances of this world. However, as has been mentioned, it entails exchanging the reality-oriented ego-vision for the inward gaze—like Oedipus upon tearing out his eyes, and the seer Tiresias, or Samson. When blinded to this world of appearance, the inner world of transparent, invisible psychic substance may open up, to be sighted. This change in the ego-Self relationship marks a release of the ego from the persona of social roles. It is the invisibility of allowing oneself to be a beggar, a wanderer, or an old fool—not in the social, but in the psychological sense.

In order to attain a sense of integrity in old life, rather than suffer severe despair, Erikson emphasizes the importance of reflection. The reflective instinct is specifically human, and determines “[t]he richness of the human psyche and its essential character,” says Jung. Reflexio, which means ‘bending back,’ “is a turning inwards, with the result that, instead of an instinctive action, there ensues ... reflection or deliberation.”

“What youth found and must find outside,” says Jung, “the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself.” Jung calls reflection “the cultural instinct par excellence.” Reflection on one’s life is instrumental at every developmental stage, unless it takes precedence over living one’s life. In old age, the proportions alter, so that reflection on one’s life becomes at least as important as merely living it.

When cut off from one’s inner depths, the personality shrinks as the ego dries up and becomes limited. A reflective state of mind, however, enables the depths to be reflected in the mirror of one’s Self and soul. Henry Miller tells us in Colossus of Maroussi that he did not know the meaning of peace until he visited the principal sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus, where dream incubation began around 600 BCE. In the intense stillness and the great peace at Epidaurus “I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.” Henry Miller makes it clear that Epidaurus, principally, is an internal space, “the real place is in the heart, in every man’s heart, if he will but stop and search it.” 

Reflection and imagination constitute the intangible substance of soul, which Hillman suggests refers “to that unknown component which makes meaning possible,” and which he imagines “like a reflection in a flowing mirror.” (p. 177-8)

Erel Shalit (2011) The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey, Fisher King Press.

Dr. Shalit's most recent work is The Dream and its Amplification, Erel Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti, eds. (2013, Fisher King Press).

Dr. Shalit's books can be purchased directly from Fisher King Press, at Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.