End of 2023 Wrap-Up and What's Ahead for 2024

December 14, 2023

It’s my practice every December to write an end-of-year review. Each time, I’m surprised by how much I’ve already forgotten about the nearly fifty-two weeks that have passed. Months fly by at remarkable speed while events on this planet don’t give us rest. When I take time annually to look back, I’m reminded over and over of my gratitude for this community and the space we hold together.

In 2023, we gathered together thirty-one times across continents and time zones to study, discuss, ask questions, and explore our dreams.

Specifically, we held three salons, including one wisdom-filled one on Disability as The Human Experience, and five seminars, including on The Life of Christiana Morgan, Community Dreamwork + Active Imagination, Jung’s Red Book and Black Books, and The Integration of the Masculine and Feminine.

This year we provided over $21,000 worth of scholarships and discounts for our seminars to anyone in financial need who made a request. We have done the same every year since the start of our online programming and we’re committed to continuing this practice every year going forward to ensure the accessibility of our programming.

I also sent many newsletters. I’m delighted that we got to share two guest pieces about disability from Charles Hall and Jenny Montgomery—both of which are brilliant and worth a review. I wrote about the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War and the correlations to The Red Book, and I wrote a reflection on my grandparents’ marriage and the legacy of Christiana Morgan. I did a deep dive into the mystery woman in image 155 in Jung’s Red Book here, and I shared recommendations for ten books I adored here. I also wrote a bunch of posts about the masculine and feminine in Jung’s work and, of course, I documented the extraordinary trip to visit Ann of Maine and Christiana Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh: here’s Part 1 and Part 2. Finally, sadly, I wrote a couple of pieces about trying to find my center with the start of yet another horrific war.

A New Look for the Newsletter

Our explorations here of socially relevant psychology will continue via newsletters in your inbox that look just a little different than this one.

This is the last email you’ll see that has The Salome Institute header!

You’ll soon receive a notification that I’ve shifted to the Substack platform with a bit more information. The new newsletter, Self & Society, will arrive in your inbox a few times a month—just like this one.

It’ll look a little like this:

And like this:

All subscribers will receive the writing I share, just as before. All subscribers will also now be able to share thoughts on the articles in Substack’s comments feature, which has not previously been possible with our newsletter. I’ll invite questions and host discussions there. I’m excited to be able to engage more fully in dialogue with you outside of our seminars.

Paid subscribers will receive additional benefits, much like the community subscription we launched here in 2022—but, hopefully, much more accessible.

To that point, I’m closing out this year with one final event and would love to have you there.

New Year’s Eve Gathering

On Sunday, December 31st at 10 am PST / 6 pm GMT, we’ll gather online for some year-end rituals and an exploration of The I Ching. Please join me!

This gathering is a kick-off event for Self & Society and all paid subscribers* will receive automatic access to the end-of-year gathering. I’ll write once more about that before the end of the year so you’ll have another heads-up.

Until then, happy holidays and happy solstice, with prayers for peace for all nations, all people, and all living things.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

*Please just send an email with a brief note if you can’t afford the monthly subscription but want to be a part of the New Year’s Gathering.

Fantasy is the Creative Function: Carl Jung's 1925 Seminar

November 28, 2023

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel like each page of text for our upcoming seminar includes a provocative, fabulous idea. Like this one, for instance: “Fantasy is the creative function—the living form is a result of fantasy.”

That quote alone induces a great deal of food for thought for me. But within just a couple of paragraphs, Jung explores a great deal more. In this particular section, he explains how a specific young woman (a cousin of his) transformed herself out of a mediumistic, semi-psychotic state into a respected professional in Paris. He explores the tension of opposites at play within her, ghosts and ancestors, the transcendent function, and the value of dreams.

“We count upon fantasy to take us out of the impasse; for though people are not always eager to recognize the conflicts that are upsetting their lives, the dreams are always at work trying to tell on the one hand of the conflict, and on the other hand of the creative fantasy that will lead the way out. Then it becomes a matter of bringing the material into consciousness.”

Jung speaks about the back-and-forth relationship that must be employed between the conscious situation and the unconscious fantasy: “[O]ne has to keep in mind that the unconscious can produce something disastrous to us.” Yet, one must also be aware that it is only the unconscious that knows the way through the tension; and that the transformation of a life situation does not always come with ease. “[O]ne must be careful not to prescribe to the unconscious—it may be that a new way is required, and even one beset with disaster. Life often demands the trying out of new ways that are entirely unacceptable to the time in which we live, but we cannot shrink from undertaking a new way for that reason.”

Again, that final sentence alone could fuel a meditation, discussion, or essay. I want to write it down and put it up on my wall as a daily reminder.

I’m looking forward to the conversations that will unfold around these ideas and so. much. more. in our seminar that starts this Friday!

Our text is “Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925,” from which the above quotes are drawn—page 11. (There is an e-book version of this text too.)

As always, class recordings will be shared with registered students within a few hours of class, and an online discussion will be ongoing throughout the week for anyone who wants to participate. Scholarships and discounts are also always available to anyone who needs financial assistance in order to participate (no questions asked!); just send an email ASAP to kelley @ salomeinstitute.com.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Days of The Dead

October 31, 2023

I wrote the essay below for my Substack newsletter as a continued process of what I wrote you a few weeks ago about trying to find my center.

I don’t speak to it directly in this piece, but part of what I’ve been processing—what I hope we’re all processing, really—is the dramatic rise in antisemitism and Islamaphobia here in the States and all over the world. The degree of activation and rage that people are currently feeling strikes me as akin to the viral mob mentality of the witch hunts or the war drummed up by hate radio in Rwanda that led to neighboring Hutus and Tutsis fearing and killing each other. People who had never thought to hate each other before were suddenly engaged in horrific acts against one another.

What we’re witnessing right now has the potential to spiral completely out of control.

College campuses are awash in protest and antisemitism that is fueled, not just by a compassionate desire to protect Palestinian lives against Netanyahu’s far-right, racist policies and retaliation but also by misinformation, false equivalencies, and a determination to be on the right side of history. The danger of certainty in one’s position in a history as complex as this—with untrustworthy, violent extremists in both governments—is a loss of nuance, an inability to discern the sources of slogans and opinions, and a perpetuation of violence by placing blame where it does not belong.

Just as there is the potential for this to spiral out of control, there is the potential for all of us to keep our wits about us and ground before we act or speak. Sources of information need to be checked. Grief and confusion need to be sorted. Rage and righteousness need to be processed internally.

To be clear: we can be wildly opposed to Netanyahu’s government both as regards the occupation and the catastrophic bombardment of Palestine, as so many Israelis are, without even approaching antisemitic beliefs or statements. Americans are not Trump. Israelis and Jews all over the world are not Netanyahu.

I want to propose that this can be a time of maturation and the development of discernment for all of us. Or it can be the opposite. I hope it won’t be.

You can read the full piece that I wrote for Substack here, or scroll below to begin reading. I begin to quote from Jung and The Undiscovered Self shortly after the section ends.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

-William Butler Yeats

We’ve been here before. The details are different, but we’ve been here before.

As I’ve floundered in my grief over these last weeks and felt waves of hopelessness pass over me, I’ve found grounding in the words of writers who lived long before our time, enduring conflicts as horrific as anything we could yet imagine.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We do not have to fight like dogs thrown into a ring together, seeking to tear the other to shreds while crowds look on.

“Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, and one lays the blame on the other.”

―Carl Jung, The Red Book

I've been immersed lately in readings for a course I’m teaching called “Toward Wholeness,” which is all about the union of the opposites, from a Jungian perspective. Explicitly, the seminar is about the integration of the masculine and feminine within each of us and the damage that patriarchy has done to our ability to relate deeply. In class together, we inquire into what life beyond the script of division might look like. We read, discuss, and share stories of another way forward that might not require us to define ourselves by what we aren’t while seeking to possess or destroy the “other” outside.

Sports provide a place for us to peacefully project and battle the dualism of our nature, but life, like war, is not a team sport. The victory of one side over another only assumes a future conflict and reinforces a distinct sense of being caught in a time loop. We’ve been here before.

Perhaps, as this Pema Chödrön quote reminds us, there is an element of all of this that is core to the reality of existence:

“Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that.”

We’ve talked about this a lot in our class too, that coming together and the falling apart. This is the core of what we think of as healthy attachment: the ability to be held in connection and then part without fear; to be connected, and then separate again. It is also the way we build muscle: small tears and repairs, over and over. But we know too that large tears lead to injury, not strength, and that painful or violent separations make coming back together again harder and harder.

Pema Chödrön offers the solution too:

“The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

In what can seem like endless war and violence both at home and abroad, I can feel myself pleading silently that we might finally make room. That we might learn to discern the actual roots of our division and find a way forward beyond revenge and violence and even, perhaps, beyond proclamations and protest.

XO, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

The Journey to Christiana Morgan’s Tower | Part 2

October 19, 2023

When I left off about my trip to Maine and Massachusetts, we were just about to arrive at Christiana Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh—a home inspired by Jung’s Bollingen Tower that is (like his) a sacred space, a three-dimensional expression of the soul and the journey of individuation.

We arrived at a gravel road surrounded by woods and pulled off to park on the side of the road, then walked toward the building that Christiana had constructed and lived in for four decades.

Christiana Morgan was twenty-eight when she entered analysis with Jung in Zurich. Her subsequent pioneering work influenced the development of Analytical Psychology and helped to found the field of psychology in America, inspiring the careers of countless young researchers and clinicians at Harvard and beyond. Yet as a woman of her era, she wasn’t officially recognized as a professional at Harvard and since that time her work has been published under a man’s name or forgotten.

Weather Wood and Shingle Roof Cottage with Chimney with Tower Behind
Exterior of Tower in Stone and Wood Cottage Stained Dark and Weathered with the sun shining on both and green foliage in front
Ann Carroll looking up at christiana morgan's tower with an big smile

While the once meticulous gardens around the property are no longer tended, there is a sense of magic that radiates from the building and the land. (You can see the lovely Ann Carroll marveling at that here.) With history and artwork around every corner and a river running alongside it, it’s an overwhelmingly beautiful place.

Nine panel stained glass with serpents, starts, and mandala images in green, gold, red, and black colors

Around the far side of the Tower are the stained glass windows that Christiana designed herself and commissioned from a female artist. Naturally, they’re rich with archetypal imagery.

This is how the inside of this space, the meditation room, was designed to look, with the light pouring in.

Dimly lit room featuring Christiana's stained glass window illuminated from the outside showing lots of colors snakes, sun, stars, and mandala imagery

Every surface of this building was meticulously designed and cared for.

And so… while I had heard about the current state of things inside the Tower, I really wasn’t prepared for the visceral shock I experienced once I stepped inside.

Rather than try to put it into words, I’ll show you.

A picture of original stained glass window with piles of junk in the foreground

This same scene of stuff pervades every single inch of the building. Top to bottom. Left to right.

The wanton disregard for a sacred place once so consciously constructed and tended is hard to see; it’s a tragedy consistent with the loss of so much of Christiana’s art, scholarship, and history already.

While the 9-12 boarding school adjacent to Christiana’s property is now the legal owner and steward of the buildings and land, there appear to be no guidelines for occupancy. In their need for faculty housing, Christiana’s home has been used for just that purpose for many years. No matter the intention of the school or those who are living there, the concern for the history of the building, her history, and the history of psychology and women’s art, appear utterly dismissed in favor of the functionality of its rooms and walls.

I’d love to be able to show you the countless meticulous wood carvings in addition to the stained glass, iron window coverings, and other original furnishings (much of her library is still there!). But there’s essentially no way to photograph any of the original artwork without the desecration surrounding it: duct tape on the mahogany bookshelves, wet towels thrown over the hardwood doors with original carvings, clothes and piles of things everywhere; dust, cobwebs, and dirt covering every single surface.

We all did our best to find and photograph the work. I’ve cropped a couple of photos here to do my best—and to offer perspective.

Gold print of 4 mandalas containing crosses, faces, and wings, archetypal drawings
garbage cans, plastic tubs, tools, and bags full of stuff in front of custom woodworking which you can barely see
A intricate wood carving of birds and deer surrounded by leaves

Details of Archetypal Nature Wood Carving - Christiana Morgan’s Tower

This next image was once—and still is—the bed board, though the original mahogany bed frame has been removed and gone missing.

Custom wood carved headboard with a flower and mandala in front of detailed carvings

It’s actually hard to capture the level of detail and artistry in these wood carvings let alone begin to digest the layers of symbolism and meaning. There are still many years or decades of scholarship needed to attend to Christiana’s legacy.

But surrounded by all the stuff, seeing the damage to the wood, it’s hard to take in. I was genuinely in shock at the juxtaposition of beauty and disaster. Really, there’s no way to overemphasize the contrast between the intended use of this space and how it is being lived in today.

The words that run the length of the door beside the carving above read: The Standard of Living is Ecstasy.

pile of towels, clothes and laundry bins strewn about
small cabinet doors under the books. Each one is carved with a name: Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Melville, Sand, and others.

This is a close-up of one of those small cabinet doors under the books. Each one is carved with a name: Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Melville, Sand, and others. I was unable to see all of the authors named.

This is a close-up of a cabinet doors with the name Jung on it

Here are just a few more (cropped) glimpses of what the walls contain that I was able to see.

wood carving of Wood Carving, Morgan, Man and Woman Radiating Light, the couple Embracing and Tree of with branches nad no leaves
Wood carving of women embracing
Window Cover Carving of Tower with light shining through

On one significant level, walking through this building felt like walking through Frida Kahlo’s home in Mexico City. The sense of awe, the experience of soul, the ability to see the person and her artwork intertwined.

Appropriately, Frida Kahlo’s home is a museum today. Visitors can enter her carefully crafted space, honor her, and learn about her life and work.

The same is true of Jung’s home, and Freud’s.

Not so for Christiana.

The current use of the space only reinforces the erasure of Christiana Morgan and of women scholars and artists throughout history.

She was a pioneering female artist, researcher, clinician, and author whose influence on the field must be better understood and respected. She has been relegated to being a background figure in Jung’s work and in the establishment of psychology at Harvard (and, therefore, in America) only because of her sex and the time in which she lived.

As I’ve expressed, there are various actions (in collaboration with Christiana’s granddaughter, Hilary) to support the proper restoration and protection of The Tower on the Marsh and all of the artwork it contains.

Concurrently, we’re gathering a growing team of volunteers to organize a digital archive of Christiana’s papers—including her extensive notes from her analysis with Jung and the original artwork and visions from her active imagination.

If you are interested in joining us with some volunteer time on this project, please send me a note! If you know of any grants or individuals who might be able to help with the necessary funds to sponsor the publication of her papers and/or support the Tower, please just hit reply!

I won’t send more emails like this for a while, but we’ll be working away in the background.

Meanwhile, I send my love to each of you in these ongoing dark times. I can only hope that someday we will find a way through violence and war begetting more violence and war. Every day feels like a dance of carrying on while holding grief.

XO, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Trying to Find My Center in a Week of War

October 14, 2023

I’ve never been very active on social media, but last week this very casual habit became so toxic it made it hard for me to function. Checking into Instagram on occasion felt like walking into a room where people were screaming at one another, a room in which some people were being genuinely hurt and others were just opining for all to hear. I couldn’t help but feel that outside actors were involved to further divide us. This was no place for genuine grief about the truly horrific, unspeakable events in Israel and Palestine, and yet everyone was commenting on it; so many people who are neither Jewish, nor Palestinian, nor subject-matter experts were posting and re-posting with aplomb.

I deleted the app from my phone.

My choice to stop interacting, even passively, has done nothing to stop the war or relieve suffering. But my decision to step away from the fray has prevented me from inadvertently adding to it, whether online or off. I had lost my center; rage and anguish were pulsing through my veins and I couldn’t find presence. I wasn’t able to think rationally or without anger. I needed to remember the essence of Jung’s story of the rainmaker. Regaining my center was the first and second thing I needed to do. Stepping away from that noise has helped. So has yoga, meditation, therapy, journaling, being with people I love, being in nature, teaching and talking with vibrant people, and reading a beautiful novel.

I am, nonetheless, still ill-equipped to speak to the horror of recent days or the horror that is coming. I can barely even type this without crying.

There are three particular pieces of writing that spoke to me this week, though. I offer them to you here in case they might be of value to you too. Here’s Elise Loehnen, Nicholas Kristof, and Nir Avishai Cohen. I know that amidst the painful and divisive noise, there are also a lot of beautiful souls holding both the grief and the need to do something different than what we have been doing for decades and centuries.

You may recall that I had intended to send Part 2 about my pilgrimage to Christiana Morgan’s Tower, but it felt even less appropriate to do so today than when I sent Part 1 early last week. I will get back to that soon. That trip was, in contrast, a week of beauty, creativity, and a reminder of what can come from mutual affection and mutual concern.

May this weekend’s new moon eclipse provide some space for release. And may this Sunday bring you some peace. Sleep well, nourish your body, and if you think of it, send people notes of love.

XO, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

The Journey to Christiana Morgan’s Tower | Part 1

October 10, 2023

The world is awash in even more war and natural disasters today than it was the last time I wrote you. And, as my thoughts on those topics are as raw as anyone’s, I am going to stay the course today and share, instead, about my trip to Maine and Massachusetts and the journey to Christiana Morgan’s Tower, before I forget the details. In brief, it was an extraordinary trip. I want to try to convey just a little bit of that magic to you. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read my last post for a little backstory.)

Saturday:

Carol (Ferris) and I had a midnight flight scheduled but it was so horribly delayed that we made a game-time call to reschedule for the following day. (Leaving at 3am only to miss a connecting flight and sit for potentially hours upon hours in JFK did not sound appealing.) It was delicious to fall asleep in my own bed that night and know that I wouldn’t be facing that exhausting uncertainty. 

Sunday: 

We caught our new red-eye out of Portland, Oregon direct to Boston (change of plans) and tried to sleep on the flight as much as we could!

Carol and Satya in airport, wearing mask and eyeglasses, embracing and ready to jump on a plane.

Me (Satya Doyle Byock) and Carol Ferris at the Portland airport

Monday: 

We arrived in Boston so very early, got our rental car, and drove into Boston for breakfast because we’re in Boston! How fun and unexpected.

boston highway, an empty road, blue skies, nothing but skyscrapers ahead
coffee, tortillas, fried eggs, pickled red onions, a cup of coffee and a glass of water

We pointed at lots of buildings and walked around a bit. Then we drove from Boston to Maine to meet Ann Carroll, whom we had never met in person. We’ve worked together on Zoom for several years now— beginning with The Red Book salons when Ann popped in and introduced herself as “Ann from Maine” and started translating The Red Book from the original German and dropping wisdom with every breath.

Here’s the moment that Carol and Ann met!

Astrologer Carol Ferris Christiana Scholar Ann Carroll embracing.

Ann Carroll and Carol Ferris

And here’s us grabbing a selfie together moments after arriving. We’re standing in front of a series of prayer wheels that Ann constructed from old maple barrels and placed inside a small structure so that anyone walking past can make a prayer. The whole scene is absolutely amazing.

Carol, Satya, and Ann pose for a photo in front of Ann's Maine Home

For the rest of that day, we enjoyed looking at Ann’s beautiful home along the river, met her fabulous husband, Chick, and prepared a simple dinner together. Over pasta and salad that evening, we got to meet another couple of longtime Salome friends whom we’d yet to meet in person. It was a lovely evening and we went to bed very early.

Tuesday:

We were up early and drove to a town in Massachusetts about 90 minutes away where we met Hilary Morgan (Christiana Morgan’s granddaughter), and Mara, a Salome friend who has been helping with a Christiana-related task.

The group of us had a quick breakfast at a local diner and then traveled together to The Governor’s Academy, a 9-12 boarding & day school that is now the lawful steward of Christiana’s Tower. The archivist there generously shared with our group the various papers pertaining to Christiana that they have on file, as well as some of her artwork that has been removed from the Tower for safekeeping. That portrait of her up there (scroll up!) used to be in the Tower but is currently on the wall in the archives in a temperature-controlled space.

Here are some of the wood shutters that Christiana carved that have been removed only very recently from the Tower for protection.

Intricate woord carved shutters with archetypal imagery, alchemical and religious symbols

You can see those shutters in their original location in this image from Christiana’s living room in the Tower, as it looked back in the day.

You can also see where her portrait used to live in the upper right-hand corner. (Photo courtesy of Hilary Morgan.)

And here, from the archives, is just one of the countless gems hidden amidst the papers: a poem for Christiana by the poet, Antonio Alfredo Giarraputo, upon hearing of her passing.

A handwritten letter to Christiana Morgan from Antonio Alfredo Giarraputo written in red ink on white paper

There are also many, many documents pertaining to the legal ownership of the Tower and various pieces of correspondence with Harry Murray (and so much more). I’ve yet to spend much time with these documents myself, but we’re cataloging the images we took of these papers for future exploration. As time passes, I’m likely to share more about what’s in those archives with all of you.

For those of you who are new to this story, you might read a bit more here from the Harvard archives where most of Christiana’s papers are stored. (Her Wikipedia page is, unfortunately, rather inaccurate —Is anyone out there comfortable with editing Wikipedia and want a brief internship…?)

After leaving the archives, Hilary took us to see the statue of Christiana created by Gaston Lachaise, which was being stored in a relatively empty room at the school amidst a few folding tables, chairs, art supplies, and a swarm of very large and very angry wasps whose nest had just been destroyed. (What’s the symbolism there?)

A statute of christiana morgan, nude, on a pedestal amidst artists paints, brushes, and other supplies

Given the very protective wasps, we visited with Christiana only briefly before getting back in our rental cars for a short drive to the Tower on the Marsh.

Wild grass in the foreground around a calm body of water with tall green trees in the background.

After just a couple of minutes, we paused briefly on the side of the road to get context for where Christiana spent so much time in hermitage, study, relationship, and art-making. If you squint, you can see Christiana’s gray Tower in the middle of the trees, beyond the water. It’s hard to convey the beauty of this place and the feeling of peace that it exudes. We all marveled at the feeling. 

Then our small group continued on towards the Tower for our chance to see it up close and wander its halls.

…to be continued! (Read Part 2 here)

I’ll send what happened during our visit to the Tower and the days following in a second installment very soon!

I will say now that this trip has only further inspired all of us to devote energies to protecting the Tower and Christiana’s legacy. And we could use your help! There’s much more to say about the specific work and why it’s so inspiring, but if you already know that you’d like to help, please reply to this email. 

We could use interns to organize a trove of digital files from her original never-before-published vision journals, which inspired Jung’s Vision Seminars, and some other incredible papers. As you can imagine, we could also use funds to potentially edit & publish her archives and to restore the Tower.

More soon!

XO, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

To learn more about Christiana and the Tower, here are a few quick resources:

The Personal is Political: On the Masculine and Feminine in Society

September 7, 2023

“Humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is.”
— C.G. Jung, The Red Book

My seminar on Integrating the Masculine and Feminine in Self & Society starts at 9am tomorrow, Portland time. There’s still time to register! A Zoom link for the live classes is sent automatically upon registration, as is the login for the community forum where people are already sharing some extraordinary thoughts. (I’m so impressed by the quality of being and thinking everyone brings to these gatherings.)

While this seminar is not a gender studies course and won’t be focused explicitly on the politics of gender, I’m endlessly aware that the personal is political. All of our conversations on the psychological experience of gender and the Jungian concepts will occur against the backdrop of patriarchy and the policing of gender and gender expression worldwide, be it around trans rights, gay rights, women’s rights, abortion rights, or the widespread toxic assertion that masculinity and “real men” are misogynistic, unfeeling, and dominant.

It’s important for those of us who are cis-gendered and heterosexual to speak about our own gender confusion or gender struggles. Most cis-hetero people I know have questioned, at one time or another, their gender and sexuality, even if in vaguer terms than emerges for many gay and trans people. Jung’s work provides a framework for a greater understanding of these questions for all of us. Indeed, his questions and his awareness of the absence of the feminine in his life were core to his own psychology, healing, and his subsequent body of work.

Cis, straight men and women still experience confusion about how to inhabit their bodies in public, including sorting out what aspects of self need to be cut out or enhanced, what kind of gender performance is required, and what gendered expectations for our lives we’ve adhered to, unwittingly, despite being potentially ill-fitting for our souls.

The work of LGBTQ+ people on the margins has repeatedly made it more possible for cis, straight people like myself to thrive and be individuals in our own rights. It’s an unfair arrangement of labor and benefits. The more on the margins a person is, the less possible it is to suppress the self and survive, so the struggle is often life or death. This struggle, this revolution and search for expansion, results in benefits for everyone. But it needn’t be this lopsided. All of us would benefit from more cis-hetero people acknowledging the confusion around gender and the compromises we need to make to navigate a patriarchal world.

It’s a complicated and devastating moment in history when it comes to the policing of gender (566 pieces of anti-trans legislation have been introduced in the United States this year alone while women fight to regain basic reproductive rights), but it’s a remarkably beautiful moment too.

I say that it’s a beautiful moment culturally around gender because we’re seeing more and more people reclaim the pre-colonial, pre-white supremacist lens on gender in which the binary isn’t a codified, “biological,” absolutist truth. Again, as much as Jung contradicts himself throughout his writing on this topic, he also recognized all over the place, from alchemy to mythology, that the greatest goals and Gods transcend the binary. They’re the “hermaphrodites,” the “androgens,” or the coniunctio. They’re the transcendent third.

There is oh so much to explore. I fear that even in eight sessions, we’ll only scratch the surface. But I can’t wait to begin.

XO, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

The One-Sided Patriarchally Masculine Value-Canon

September 1, 2023

Around this time next week, I’ll I’ll kick off an eight-week seminar off an eight-week seminar on Jung’s thinking around the Anima + Animus, and the feminine + masculine.

In the midst of what can easily become abstractions, we’ll explore how these ideas relate to us personally: to our memories of our first loves and our parents, to people that arise in our dreams, and to our perceptions of ourselves within a society that has very specific ideas about how we should be.

The authors we’ll read include Carl Jung (of course), Claire Douglas, Ann Ulanov, John Beebe, bell hooks, Angela Saini, Carol Gilligan, Frederick Joseph, and Sabi Tauber. And there are many other authors whose work I’ll add in throughout the seminar as juicy, delicious, or controversial optional-reads.

While putting together the weekly readings, I discovered anew how much extraordinary writing there is on these topics and also how much writing is frozen and calcified in an entirely different world. I’ve done my best to parse through things well before we gather, but there is oh-so-much to continue to parse through. Contradictions abound! So many updates are needed! Yet so much of the core of this material radiates with brilliance. I really can’t wait to get started.

Today, I’ll leave you with one beautiful nugget from Erich Neumann’s profound text, “The Fear of the Feminine.” I know I’ve shared quotes from this work in the past, but these lines (obtuse as they are) strike me every time.

“The one-sided patriarchally masculine value-canon of [Western] consciousness… has contributed in a major way to the crisis of our time. Hence understanding the Feminine is an urgent necessity not only in order to understand the single individual but also to heal the collective.”

-Erich Neumann

As much as updates are required (and they are) this field has been talking about the negative effects of patriarchy on all of us, far ahead of its time. (How anyone has found an alt-right agenda in the Jungian language is beyond me.)

And so, we’ll be talking about that too. Starting next week!

What does integration of the masculine and feminine look like for you?

XO, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

You Yourself Are a Conflict that Rages

August 24, 2023

I am immersed in the final stages of syllabus preparation for our upcoming course, Toward Wholeness: Integrating the Masculine & Feminine in Self and Society. As we plan to send a welcome email out to all registered students on Monday morning, I’m going to keep cooking and keep this post short!

In lieu of a longer newsletter, I wanted to share these absolutely beautiful lines from a letter that Jung wrote to Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, the founder of the Eranos Conference, in 1945. If you’re like me, you may want to read it a few times through because of its power. Some of Jung’s greatest writing is found in his letters…

“You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life.

Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the ‘reconciling third’ takes shape. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen, happen.”

Whew!

XO, Satya

Why the Feminine and Masculine are Equally Important in Individuation

When spoken of psychologically, “the feminine” is often correlated with “care.” Historically, people have tended to think of women as inherently more caring and more likely to parent with tenderness so then equate this with the feminine aspect of self. The feminine is also often viewed as “the receptive.” This correlation is partially related to the tone of the yin as seen in the I Ching (Hexagram 2, for instance, with all yin lines) and Taoism. Receptivity comes up as a definition, finally, because of cis female genitalia and its role in heterosexual sex—never mind that such an interpretation is largely predicated on a male gaze of good sex or the very different function that the vagina serves in childbirth.

In any case, these are not my primary associations with the feminine.

I don’t mean to reject them completely, but they just don’t check out with my embodied self. They don’t strike me as quite right or entirely true. (Partially, I think, because both “care” and “receptivity” as related to the feminine feel most closely connected to an Anglo view of girls and women.)

This is all exceedingly complex, messy, and beautiful stuff to explore because we—I, anyway—want to walk a line between parroting verbatim what we’ve heard from other scholars and throwing the whole thing out completely.

Some of Jung’s earliest thinking on the feminine and masculine was connected with his exploration of typology. He viewed the feminine as Eros but then Eros became both the Anima and the Feeling Function. The feminine and feeling became deeply correlated to the point that they sometimes remain inseparable. The Thinking Function, meanwhile, has been correlated with the masculine.

There’s so much in all of this to parse out and digest. To be sure, these are the kinds of things we’ll be exploring in my upcoming seminar starting September 8th! But I want to tell you a bit here about where I land with all of these ideas and how my thinking rests on the foundations of classical Jungian psychology.

I view the feminine aspect of self primarily as relatedness in regards to friendship, connection, and intimacy, but also in regards to the Piscean waters of the Everything from whence we came. Without an aspect to balance it out, the feminine can be devouring, suffocating, and surprisingly lonely. Too much relatedness without separateness ends up not being relatedness at all because there is no self and no other, no potential for connection between two. There’s just the one.

(How is all this connected to what I wrote about the Mother and the Son recently, or what I wrote about the individual and community last week?)

The masculine, in this binary, serves the purpose of separateness. The goal is one of becoming and, as such, the masculine seeks difference and differentiation.

But this is the key point as regards the two poles: individuation is only achieved through a developmental and then a progressive, life-long dance between separateness and relatedness.

Jung’s concept of “individuation” is not about individualism. Individuation is about self-becoming on the way towards a deeper witnessing of and relatedness to other(s).

“I can see you because I exist as me.”

&

“I am outside of the whole in order that I can look back on the whole and bear witness to its beauty.”

What heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has forgotten, egregiously, is the whole bit about seeking relatedness after the attempt to separate. This means a lot of people (and the planet as a whole) is stuck in either separateness or (even worse) trying unsuccessfully to separate. The result is a lot of attempts to become without remembering the entire point of becoming.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

On the Community and the Individual

August 11, 2023

I am still metabolizing my experience at the Quarterlife Retreat on San Juan Island last week, held at the very beautiful Saturn’s Return Farm + Inn (go visit!).

Over four days that felt like four weeks, twelve participants between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-eight gathered for beautiful food, deep conversations, self-exploration, and community.

We entered mythic time, experienced countless synchronicities that shook us, and had poignant encounters with creatures from Bald Eagles to Black Foxes; we read poems and prose and talked all about the experience of being human. Everyone came with their own particular life questions and we did our best to explore all that arose.

After years of relative isolation through a pandemic, I was struck anew by the power of community. With minimal attention to the clock or tasks or places to be, we sunk in with each other. With nearly everyone a stranger to one another, the ground was leveled for new interactions and new bonds. Meals were held at a large farm table or on blankets in the grass. The downtime was leisurely. We were gathered for self-exploration and self-understanding, to be released from grief and depression, and to find answers to what we most needed to understand. The result was a blend of uproarious laughter and breakthrough tears, full emotions that could melt frozen states of stuckness, avoidance, neurosis, and the busyness of daily life.

Our extraordinary chef at the retreat, Gracie Gardner, had written a beautiful and prescient piece on community prior to our gathering. In it, she told a story she’d heard in a podcast with Dr. Thema Bryant, president of the American Psychological Association. It’s a story that has really stayed with me. I’ll let Gracie’s words tell the rest:

They were discussing this idea of decolonizing psychology, meaning moving away from the assumption that the individual is the unit to be therapized, and moving towards considering one’s social, economic, and political context. Highlighting cultural or indigenous ways of healing, which is often healing in community.

[Dr. Bryant] recounted a story about American psychologists who went to Rwanda after the genocide with the intention of offering aid.

“One of the community leaders reported that ‘these people said they were going to help us heal so we let them in and they did not have any music, they did not have any dancing, and they separated us and put us into these dark little rooms and wanted us to re-tell all the terrible things about our lives. That was not healing so we had to ask them to leave.”

I asked Gracie to share this poignant story at the retreat as we gathered in our closing circle on Saturday.

As each person conveyed the very individual, very personal things they were taking away from our gatherings, we also felt deeply what it is to not be isolated—and not just from a pandemic, but also not from pain, uncertainty, and the surprisingly isolating experience of existence. The healing power of community was with us not to erase the individual, as happens in mobs or unconscious collectives, but to support its full emergence. And that was the key.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Who is to Blame When it Comes to the Mother and the Son?

August 1, 2023

In Aion (CW9), Jung begins the chapter on the Anima and Animus by exploring the projection-making factor of Maya, the Spinning Woman, whom we may have encountered in our dreams. He’s setting up the idea of the anima but quickly pivots to speak about something more grounded and commonly understood: the destructive pattern of a devouring mother, and a son who would prefer to be devoured.

“Where does the guilt lie?” Jung asks. “With the mother or with the son? Probably with both.”

In Barbara Hannah’s commentary on Aion, meanwhile, she emphasizes the blame on the mother. She states that this is likely because she is a woman and, perhaps, feels embarrassed by a tendency she can recognize in herself and other women. (There is some shame within the blame.)

Marie-Louise von Franz does the same throughout her lectures and writings on heterosexual intimacy and discussions of the anima or animus—including in this lecture. She is notably hard on women in a way that to most people’s ears today, there is a note of a complex or an over-identification with Jung and perhaps, therefore, her own animus at play.

What is true? Who is right? How do we separate the gender of the speaker from the ideas being spoken?

Jung continues:

“The unsatisfied longing of the son for life and the world ought to be taken seriously. There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift—from the mother. The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force. It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales. For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life.”

Jung, a man, conveys a kind of thwarted agency of a growing young man and emphasizes his desire to slide back into unconsciousness and the embrace of the Mother. Jung names, meanwhile, the vivifying force of love, of a maiden, an anima image, by his side. The anima-Eros-woman offers support and motivation to leave Mother and, therefore, lends him the agency to live his own life. (But does he then need to leave her to find himself again?)

There is so much to be learned and discussed from these short paragraphs, and from Hannah and von Franz’s discussions too.

But also so many questions arise to the modern reader that can’t easily be set aside. What about a growing man who is attracted to men? Does the anima image take the form of a male? Is that, then, the animus? Or might we return to an original idea of Eros as the male god?

What, meanwhile, would we make of a mother-daughter relationship that is overly enmeshed and in which the daughter is being devoured? What agency is required of the daughter to break free and find her own life? Is Eros needed there too?

Join me to explore all of this and more in the upcoming seminar in which we’ll explore the masculine and feminine and how they might be integrated in our actual lives today.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Post-Jungian Masculine Archetypes

July 13, 2023

I very rarely post anything of note on Instagram but last November, in response to the mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado, I posted this quote from Jung’s Red Book as a graphic:

“I have thrown down my sword and dressed in women’s clothing.”

It’s a striking line and provocative in an era of growing fear of anyone who does not fit into a very narrow gender framework—to be clear, that’s most of us.

Below the quote, I wrote the following:

Jungian psychology has been weirdly co-opted by the alt-right in the last decade to support a reductive hetero-masculine storyline. It’s bizarre, because Jung’s work is literally about the integration of the feminine and the search for the sacred inner marriage in a patriarchal culture. Jung’s Red Book, written around the time of WWI, is about the reclamation of Jung’s soul, a Kali-like figure of whom he is initially terrified and calls “Salome.”

Jung worked hard to heal his own feminine and to stay in relationship with her, knowing that he was a product of a lopsided and sick culture, and that the absence of the feminine in Christianity (and all religion) was causing violence worldwide.

Drag queens are not the problem. Trans people are not the problem. Women seeking abortions are not the problem. The problem is the refusal of a hyper-masculine culture to ask itself deeply “what’s missing? Why am I depressed, lonely, scared, and constantly feeling the need to defend and protect myself?”

As if on cue, a man who is a total stranger to me commented: “Quote taken out of context but you're partly correct.”

Of course, all quotes shared in a graphic on social media are taken out of context. Our exchange was very brief, but he asserted his intellectual superiority with a great deal of security. In the final comment, to which I did not respond, he wrote: “I think I am quite likely more educated in relation to Jung.”

We know nothing about each other, but he’s pretty sure he knows more about Jung than me.

I’ve hesitated for years to challenge this kind of thing directly and to just do my own work, but experiences like this are piling up. (This was not the first or most recent encounter of its kind, nor the most significant.)

There are certain public intellectuals (some dead, some alive) who purport to provide heterosexual men with valuable psychological orientation based on Jung’s work (much needed!). The result for many, however, is nothing of the sort. Indeed, there is an ever-growing population that believes they have a deep understanding of Jung’s work because of the post-Jung, hyper-masculine interpretations that they’ve been fed. There’s a repetition of things like “the four masculine archetypes” (not a real thing) or the one-to-one association of the feminine with chaos and chaos with women and the need, therefore, for men to control the feminine within and without.

Barf.

All of this ultimately fuels hatred of the feminine and anything other than the “archetypal masculine” (again, not a thing) rather than support in the psychological integration of the opposites.

There is no “archetypal feminine” or “archetypal masculine,” which is why you need to really get deep into the original ideas to make sense of them and how they apply to your own life. Any so-called archetypes being used in this way are just stereotypes by another name.

Which is why this stuff gets complicated! So I hope you’ll join me in my upcoming seminar to study more. I won’t hand over a quick and easy cheat sheet on the “masculine” or the “feminine” because there isn’t one! But we will explore, discuss, study, and hopefully make sense of what it means to integrate the opposites and find wholeness in our lives—and by extension, in the world.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

The Mysterious "Daughters" in Jung's Red Book Image 155

June 10, 2023

Image 155 from Carl Jung’s Red Book

I’ve long wondered about the mysterious image in Jung’s Red Book of a veiled woman standing before a crowd. At the end of the last course on Jung’s Red Book & Black Books, I suddenly found myself captivated by her and unable to teach what I’d had planned. We spent a great deal of time exploring her instead.

Many of Jung’s images in The Red Book are entirely unrelated to the surrounding text. In fact, as Jung spent many years transferring his initial visions from 1913-1914 into the red leather-bound manuscript, the paintings were largely undertaken years later. Most relate to entries from years later found only in The Black Books. Because of this, when reading and teaching the material, I’ve found myself glossing over many of the images, not knowing their origin and wary of projecting my own conclusions onto the symbols and landscapes without anything tangible as proof. That’s perhaps never been more true with the engaging image on page 155 (above).

The text in which this painting is embedded offers no real conclusions, yet it sits adjacent to a similarly large-scale painting of Philemon—the alchemist-magician and image of Jung’s Self—as if she is his feminine counterpart, two sides of a whole. In fact, she is the only clear feminine form depicted visually in the entire book, save some tiny images of Salome in the first few pages. Yet while we know a great deal about Philemon, the gray-bearded man with kingfisher wings, there is no certain parallel for this seemingly Middle Eastern woman. She is almost entirely covered in a light blue robe and holding the attention of a modern, perhaps rambunctious crowd. Golden light descends above her and a crescent moon hangs to her left, evoking various icons of the Virgin Mary, as angels hang above her on either side. Classic images of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and of the Immaculate Conception both strongly evoke this divine woman in blue.

But it would be too simple to say that she’s the Virgin Mary. Something else is going on.

I have referred in the past to her simply as Salome, given her proximity to Philemon, an outgrowth of Elijah in The Red Book and Salome’s initial counterpart. This woman’s veiled appearance may also be a nod to Salome, as Oscar Wilde depicted her performing an interpretation of a Middle Eastern dance which he called “the dance of the seven veils” in his 1891 play Salomé. But Jung leaves no explicit indication that it is Salome whom he has depicted in this image.

This image, like that of Philemon, is situated within “The Magician” chapter, near the end of the book, just as Jung begins playing the flute to an iridescent serpent in order to, he says, “make her believe that she was my soul.” Yet that passage, while suggestive of a feminine soul, really doesn’t provide insight into the image. Moreover, this is a passage whose tone around the feminine changed a great deal from the original entry in The Black Books (a common and grating change).

The original entry from January 29, 1914, comes directly after a conversation that Jung had with Philemon about magic. The beginning dialogue doesn’t include anything about enchanting a serpent and instead goes like this:

J: My soul, what can I say? What do you say?

S: I let grass grow over everything that you do.

J: That sounds comforting and seems not to say much.

S: Would you like me to say much? I can also be banal, as you know, and let myself be satisfied that way.

J: That seems hard to me. I believe that you stand in close connection with everything beyond, with what is greatest and most uncommon. Therefore I thought that banality would be foreign to you.

The mention of banality is in direct reference to what a Salome-esq feminine character teaches him about his greatest fears in the chapter “The Castle in the Forest” (perhaps my favorite chapter).

Meanwhile, the footnote to this image is, on the whole, remarkably confusing. It’s so jumbled that it encourages further glossing over amidst so much material to get through. But the editors do provide helpful clues and translations if we have the patience to explore. They indicate, for instance, that Jung referenced this image anonymously in his 1951 essay, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore.” There, he expressed the following about a series of anima dreams (his own) which he shared as an anonymous case study.

Dream x: The unknown woman leaves the house as a petite bourgeoise with a female relation, and in her place there is suddenly an over-life-size goddess clad in blue, looking like Athene.

Dream xi: Then she appears in a church, taking the place of the altar, still over-life-size but with veiled face.

It is in his later commentary on these dreams that we get a bit deeper into the meaning of Image 155 for Jung:

Dream x shows the paradoxical double nature of the anima: banal mediocrity and Olympian divinity.

Dream xi restores the anima to the Christian church, not as an icon but as the altar itself. The altar is the place of sacrifice and also the receptacle for consecrated relics.

Though the editors reference Dream xi in their footnote, I’ve included Dream x because I think it too—and his commentary, in particular—sheds enormous light on Jung’s thinking around this painting of the mysterious woman. In fact, I’d argue that Image 155 is a combination of those two dreams.

We learn a bit more from the footnote as we understand the Latin inscriptions found throughout the painting.

The border inscription reads: “The wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory… for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” These are portions of a longer quotation from I Corinthians 2:7-10.

Is Jung suggesting here that this woman is Sophia, the wisdom behind the male godhead? But the word Sophia doesn’t arise anywhere in this text. Certainly, Sophia was of interest to Jung before and during his confrontation with the unconscious around the time of WWI. But he doesn’t speak of her here.

On either side of the arch (entirely invisible unless you’ve got the facsimile version of The Red Book in front of you) is this inscription: “the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” This text is from Revelation 22:17.

Above the arch, it reads “ave virgo virginum” which translates to “Hail, virgin of virgins” a phrase that, the editors tell us, is the title of a medieval hymn. (Though it may actually be the original work of one Jeremiah W. Cummings from the mid-1800s.)

And then there is one final, curious, very important clue on the left-hand side of the image, an Arabic word: “Daughters.” Plural.

This one word and its surprising plurality brings me back to Jung’s commentary on Dream x, which “shows the paradoxical double nature of the anima: banal mediocrity and Olympian divinity” and its connection to Jung’s Black Books entry from July 10, 1918, which caught my attention just as we were wrapping up class last May.

In this remarkable entry, Jung is in dialogue with his Soul and she is trying to explain to him that she has two properties. She expresses her frustration to him as well. They are, in the background, continuing to make sense of his love for Toni Wolff and his struggle to end his attachment to her. In this dialogue she, Toni, and Salome are intimately linked.

“S: …Why did you give me the two kinds of properties? Why did you not separate the opposites? Why did you leave me mixed? This creates the trouble of the standstill. The opposites cancelled each other out. My other half, which is on the side of the earth, is another soul than I. She is between things and you. I am between the eternal images and you. I am mind, she is feeling. I am light, she is dark. The black one [Toni Wolff] is her symbol. You have still not released Salome from her. She is the spirit of the earth that dances poisonous dances, that bewitched and intoxicates, that drinks blood and causes magical sickness. If she were released from the symbol, she would give form, substance, and actual life to the eternal images. But she intoxicates herself in the blood of the holy one [John the Baptist]. Why? She has not been released from the human symbol. Why do you love the black one? Because she is the dancer.”

Soul continues to speak and what she says is incredibly striking, an entry that sounds a great deal like the feminine-voiced Gnostic text of Thunder Perfect Mind. This Black Books section is, I believe, of direct relevance to Image 155, and it goes like this:

“S: … I carry up into eternity, she drags down into the mystery of matter, into the beauty of the earth, into the death of everything earthly. I am the daughter of the eternal mother, she is the daughter of the eternal father.”

Two daughters within one Soul. The only reference I’ve ever seen to why Jung included the Arabic word for Daughters beside this incredible image of a single woman.

Jung spoke frequently about the two sides of the anima, and here she is depicted.

So we can speak of this blue-veiled woman as an anima image, as Soul, and as Salome; all of that would be true. But it must be understood ultimately as a single image depicting two sides in one, and as a commentary, ultimately, on the ascension of Mother Mary within the Catholic Church as well. Which is, given the length of this exploration already, a conversation for another time.

Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

10 Favorites: My Recommended Summer Reading List

May 25, 2023

I’ve been so grateful to be able to read more this last year, especially as the sun returns to Portland and I can grab an hour or two outside in the burgeoning heat to sink into wonderful writing. I’m pretty sure most of my recent favorite books aren’t considered “light beach reads,” but I’ve loved so many books lately that I wanted to share them! So here’s my curated Salome Summer Reading List of ten great books in case you happen to be looking for your next really good read.

I recently devoured the memoir Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones, a book that explores the inner and outer experience of her life with a physical disability. The book begins like this: "I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living." And from that line, I didn’t want to put the book down. This memoir is a treasure. It is exquisitely written and an absolute page-turner. Oh, and she was just a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in memoir. Highly deserved.

I was similarly captivated by Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, a memoir about grief and in particular grief in quarterlife when the author (a young musician) loses her mother to cancer. I know this may not sound like a summer read (and maybe it isn’t?), but it’s so beautifully written and is punctuated continuously with the vibrant flavors, images, and smells of Korean food, meals that helped frame the author’s relationship with her mother. This book had been on the New York Times Bestseller list for so long that I was intrigued and felt like I had to check it out. I thought it was excellent and, given that it’s all about grief, a surprisingly easy read.

Okay, this one really is a classic summer read! I finally picked up Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin for the same reason that I picked up Crying in H Mart: It’s been all over the best sellers’ lists and it seemed like everyone was saying how much they loved this book. I was so curious! And I quickly became a convert. This novel is delightfully easy to read, yet it never once felt like fluff. The characters are expertly rendered and I loved following along with the turns in their lives. This particular book may speak most to Gen-Xers and elder Millennials given the historical-fiction context of coming of age in the 90s, though it’s hard to say. It’s just a beautiful novel that I rearranged my days to keep reading. I loved it.

I was deeply impressed with the novel The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling. I initially decided to read it because Lydia is a writer who now lives in Portland, and I like to try to read local authors whenever I can. I also know that she has a new novel coming out in August so I wanted to read her first novel quickly! The Golden State was unlike anything I’ve ever read in either form or content. It follows the life of a mother and her small daughter for ten days of exhaustion, uncertainty, and feeling in limbo while her husband, a Turkish citizen, is in Turkey awaiting news on his immigration paperwork that, because of human error, seems permanently stalled. It’s a little hard to convey why this book is so unusual and profound, but I truly think it’s a masterpiece. I can’t wait to read her next one!

I read the stunning novel Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi maybe two years ago now, but it has stayed with me month after month. Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and translated into seemingly every language on earth, this book is stunningly crafted. In the words of the New York Times Book Review: “Avni Doshi isn’t just a talented writer, she is an artist.” The protagonist of this story is a woman in India facing her mother’s quickly advancing dementia. She is the ambivalent daughter and caregiver of a mother who was always an ambivalent parent. As she tries to make sense of her feelings about her mother and her childhood in which she was dragged to an ashram and then onto the streets to beg, she sorts out her present life as an artist and wife. I loved this book and have come to adore the author, who has been in many a Salome Institute seminar or salon.

Avni’s story was so much on my mind as I read Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, a book I’ve mentioned a few times before. You may know the author from her extraordinarily empathetic and psychologically complex New Yorker profiles. She is unrivaled in her ability to portray the inner lives of her subjects—all real people—and evoke readers' compassion and understanding. If anyone is ever inclined to feel that our psychology, from diagnosis to treatment to social “supports” are easily defined, just one of Rachel’s profiles will complicate the picture. In this collection of profiles of people from around the world, each one extraordinary, she explores the life of an Indian woman (partially through the lens of her daughter) who entered into an arranged marriage and then began to lose her mind, ending up in ashrams and on the street many times. It was so resonant for me with Avni’s book, Burnt Sugar, and so alive.

I have very fond memories of a blissful few days beside a pool reading While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams—the governor-of-my-heart-political-powerhouse Stacey Abrams. I really never read thrillers or mysteries, but since I would follow Stacey to the ends of the earth, I was very excited to follow her into a thriller if she wrote it! I’m so happy I did. This really was the perfect beach (or pool) read. I describe it as “‘Knives Out’ meets ‘The Pelican Brief'.’” In other words, it’s a complicated who-done-it-esq story involving the Supreme Court. Also, the sequel just came out this week!! I just bought Rogue Justice and can’t wait to make that a summer read soon. I heartily encourage you to buy/borrow both and get your feet near some water.

Another double-header, of sorts: I was absolutely riveted by Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling, the story of a young Native woman, Louise White Elk, coming of age on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana in the 1940s. I loved this novel so much that I felt sad I hadn’t read it years earlier, like I’d missed something really important in my life. The writing is extraordinary and the story is so powerful I felt in awe page after page that someone can weave characters’ lives together with such seaming ease. I feel personally in luck because Debra’s first novel, The Lost Journals of Sacagawea by Debra Magpie Earling, was just re-published this week. I’m looking forward to starting this one very soon.

I’ve written plenty already about The Patriarchs by Angela Saini, but my commentary stands. It’s such an important new book.

And last but not least: I once again wholeheartedly recommend On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen. I wrote about this last time, but this book was just published on Tuesday so I’ve been reading On Our Best Behavior for the last two days and I am already lost in personal contemplation, with a heavy dose of necessary social criticism. This book tackles the toxicity of patriarchal propaganda and the insidious ways it has entered our thinking, and how to get it out. It really feels like an extension of our final Red Book class in that Elise is exploring the Gnostic roots of Christianity, what went wrong to eliminate women from the story, and the effect that has had on all of us. This book is both very nerdy and very readable, making it my favorite kind of book. Full disclosure: Elise and I grew up together and she was a huge support when my book came out last year (and before). But I would not strongly recommend this book unless I believed in it fully. I think it’s a must-read and also feel pretty sure that it’s going to hit the New York Times Best Sellers list this weekend, so, you know, it’s not just me.

I hope whatever you’re reading, you’re enjoying it. In this world, we need beautiful, insightful things to keep our souls afloat.

Sending love to you and yours,

Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Speaking of Books…!

My book, Quarterlife, is coming out in paperback in July and I’ve got a few readings lined up! I’d love to see you there!

  • Thursday, July 6th, 7pm | Eliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

On the New Book "The Patriarchs," the Definition of Masculine and Feminine, and the Policing of Gender

April 26, 2023

The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality by Angela Saini was published in February and I’ve been reading it slowly, soaking up the bounty of its pages. It’s incredibly readable and not very long, but it feels so nourishing and important that I feel I need to savor it, like sipping a bowl of healing broth.

In The Patriarchs, Saini argues that patriarchy is not—and was not—an inevitable social structure for humans. Chapter after chapter, Saini outlines the lack of evidence to support patriarchy’s inevitability and instead explains that it is simply a widespread belief that has become self-reinforcing. “Men are on top, so men are stronger and should be on top, so they’ve always been on top, so it’s inevitable.”

Though largely infiltrated by the European colonial interpretation of gender, humans have long experimented with a wide range of social structures. Cultures throughout history have existed with varied gender expressions and social structures, many of them with women being revered and respected as the leaders of households, politics, the economy, and culture. But the result is not just a picture of what we have now in reverse. Saini does a beautiful job of laying out the richness of these other cultural examples. The detailed pictures that she paints feel like journeys into an Ursula K. Le Guin novel about another world, so textured and profound, and it’s comforting to know that these other ways of being were and are part of our world.

Yet Saini takes it further as she also counters a view that is more frequently perpetuated in the Jungian world: that humans progressed uniformly at a certain point in history from matriarchies to patriarchies.

She’s very careful to indicate that while such a linear progression is compelling to consider, it’s an overly tidy story and one that is not consistent with the actual evidence. There is no single line of “progress” in which one form of human society gets wiped out in favor of a new form. The reality is far more complex.

Throughout The Patriarchs, the historical exploration invites a more nuanced exploration of many Jungian ideas like the history of the development of consciousness, the archetype of the Great Mother, and the feminine and masculine. Even in the “pro-feminine” camp, things can get far too tied up with the binary, and Saini emphasizes the dangers of that myth too.

“Men and women are framed as opposites or as possibly complementing each other, but never as varied individuals who might possess overlapping traits.

Western goddess-worshipping myths leave little room for bloodthirsty, violent goddesses like Kali, the Hindu diety. Instead, the strength of female-led societies is pinned on women having virtues that men don’t, and on men having violent natures that women don’t.”

She continues a little later:

“The qualities we define as ‘masculine’ and feminine’ are shaped by social and cultural forces. There’s no basis for assuming that what sound suspiciously like nineteenth-century Western beliefs about gender were held by people living in completely different societies thousands of years ago.

…[E]very feminist wave brings along its own notions of ‘female specialness'… This is understandable in societies in which women have been undervalued. It’s a way of regaining a sense of pride and self-belief. … [But the] cracks appear when this ‘specialness’ proves to be another straightjacket, distancing women from what are considered to be ‘masculine’ traits and defining ‘femininity’ in tight, prescriptive ways. Behind the ‘Mother Goddess,’ after all, is the archetype of the selfless, nurturing woman whose primary role is to reproduce and care for others—a set of expectations that doesn’t fit all women and has proven a burden to many.”

I find this scholarship of critical value as we seek to further understand depth psychology in the context of our daily lives, in particular in the face of widespread gender policing on the streets and in legislatures, be they bans on reproductive care (“women are meant to mothers”) or attacks on basic trans rights to exist (“men should be men and women should be women”).

To me, a better world is one in which the human experience is framed through the lens of individuation, of becoming, and not through the forced adherence to old stories about sex, gender, and power that have actually never been true.

As the most recent example, while writing, Montana House Representative Zooey Zephyr—representing my hometown of Missoula—was barred from the house floor for delivering a passionate speech about trans rights. It was a beautiful and urgent plea for humanity.

The obsession with “masculinity” and “the traditional women” has become the central platform of the GOP and it’s killing people. It’s killing men too, to be sure, through suicide, war, and household violence just as it’s killing women, non-binary, and trans people through the withholding of medical care, bullying, and suicide.

I want a better world for all of us and will continue to fight for a world in which each person can choose their own paths and find their own destiny, not be born into one and tasked with a gendered charter. That’s what fascism asks of us, not democracy.

To support the protestors defending Rep. Zooey Zephyr’s right to speak, click here.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies