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Healing Civilization Rating: 8 on a scale of 10 Review This is an excellent book. The author is a Chilean psychiatrist. He appears to have been involved with the "human potential" movement for many decades. He comes from a Freudian background, which is not surprising given that he is a psychiatrist. I won't hold it against him to much, but I greatly prefer the Jungian theoretical framework.This book is the distillation of many years of contemplation, observation, study and practice. He is an older fellow at this point. His ideas however are utterly to the point, cogent, and timely. Many folks will find him unacceptable from a religious spiritual standpoint. He is clearly.from the "new age" side of things, believing that traditional faith based religions, of whatever form, are entities of the past. From my perspective, nothing could be further from the truth with regard to religion and spirituality. Still, what he has to say is important and should be read by believers and non-believers alike. After years of work he has concluded that the fundamental problem afflicting human kind is our dependence on a patriarchal system in the world at large. He sees things as being out of balance. He believes the way to get back into balance is through an educational paradigm where we would teach people to develop awareness, in particular self-awareness and the relationship of this self to others. He believes that what we need to do is foster a "massive psycho-spiritual development of the population". He believes the basic cause of this problem has been the subjugation of the feminine aspects of humanity. He believes the world has been ruled by a patriarchal system for some three thousand years or more. The feminine side has been held down for most of recorded history. If we could be successful rebalancing the feminine and masculine aspects of our psycho-spiritual world we would be likely to benefit greatly. He would accomplish this by a massive infusion of teachers who have undergone a process of developing their own awareness, and hence, would be able to teach the process or outcomes to others. Of course, they have been trying to develop people like this for many years, and according to him, some south American countries are trying to accomplish these endeavors already. I would wonder how effective "mass education" will be for a process that seems to involve something different in my opinion. When have we been successful growing awareness of the feminine psychologically? I am not sure this has been done yet, and I believe it will require nothing short of a revolution in the consciousness of both men and women. Whether it can be taught to children is probably debatable. The recent law suit at Yale regarding sexual harassment, the law suit against Wal-mart and many others instances of sexual harassment would suggest that we have a long way to go to combat these very basis issues related to feminine-masculine awareness and understanding. The women's movement has gotten us a little way down the path but we have a long way to go. I believe a different theoretical framework would also be quite useful. Jungian psychology is much better suited to accomplish the task he is concerned about. I completely agree with his basic premise that the feminine and masculine aspects in society are out of balance. It will require a remarkably deeper understanding of why this is true than what he gives. His theoretical frame is not robust enough to handle these concepts well in my opinion. I would like to explain why I believe this is true. In about 2001, I participated in a religious conference called the Journey to Wholeness by Conlee and Signa Bodishbaugh. It was a moving and enlightening conference. In it they did a deceptively simple exercise that I will use to demonstrate the issue. They put up a white board and drew two columns on it. One column was labeled mythic male and the other mythic female. We were asked to shout out the characteristics of each. It took only a few moments to come up with the list, and all were satisfied with the contents. They then asked us which characteristics were the most "valuable". This was a particularly telling moment as we all quickly pointed out that the masculine side was the more valuable list. Here in lies our difficulty. They then spent an hour describing why this was a massive Spiritual problem for us. They were right. Now let's consider this issue a bit deeper, but let's use a Jungian frame to try and understand it in a deeper way. If you look at the list we created and considered which Jungian typological category would best fit the mythic masculine, you would quickly note that it is very accurately describing the Extraverted Sensing Thinking and Judging personality type, the so-called ESTJ type. Now if you looked at the mythic feminine, you would quickly note that it is very accurately describing the Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving personality type, the so-called INFP. I am not going to spend all the time it would take to explain this in great detail, but you should understand that these two personality types are diametrically opposites of each other. Let me summarize this, ordinary people, with no prompting, were able to come up with mythic descriptions of the feminine and masculine which exactly match the two fundamental Jungian types which per chance turn out to be respectively the most masculine and feminine types. If you were to casually peruse Myers-Briggs typology books you would see these two types referred to repeatedly because of their fundamental character and their relationship to masculine and feminine characteristics. These two types are made up of all of the Jungian functions (sensing, intuition, thinking and feeling) and attitudes (introvert, extrovert, judging and perceiving). They are in balance between the two of them. You could create seven other balanced pairs, but they are not the mythic feminine and masculine types people will pick out spontaneously. Now, let me be fair about Conlee and Signa for a moment. They are not promoters of Jungian psychology, in fact they try to stay as far away from it as possible. Let me be very clear about this. They are interested in promoting God, the God of Christianity. They were looking for the mythic male and female character because it reflects the qualities and character of God. This is a profound understanding that is very important, because God transcends typology. God contains within God's character all aspects of typology. In Christianity, we are made in the image of God, "male and female" God made us, in God's image. God is both feminine and masculine in character. There are some people and churches who will disagree with what I just said. If God is feminine in God's character then why does God present God in such male ways? I argue this is irrelevant. God can present God in any number of ways. God can come as a dream, a burning bush, a pillar of fire and smoke, as the feminine form as wisdom, and as a man in the form of Jesus Christ. God is not limited by form. God is not limited by sexuality, God is both feminine and masculine, inherently. God functions in balance. When you start to bat around the term "mythic" in a church you get a lot of frustrated gaffaws. People do not like to hear much about mythic stuff. To them, it sounds like things that smack of literature and fairy tales, which in their view are untrue and certainly not spiritual. When I speak of "myths" in relation to regular people, I am referring to the "dreams" of a people. Myths represent the dreams of groups of people, cultures, nations, and generations. We all carry within in us collective dreams that we all hold "together". What are the dreams we carry about with us? One set of dreams we carry about with us is the mythic male and female, the mythic masculine and feminine. We are not necessarily aware of it, but they are there. And, in a quite unconscious fashion, we go about comparing our dreams with reality. What we fail to recognize is how messed up the dream has become. It is currently a nightmare. We as western people have devalued the feminine qualities as unimportant (if I may be allowed to generalize for a moment). In fact, some eastern peoples may have done this, too, although I will not claim expertise in understanding the eastern world. When we devalue feminine characteristics life becomes very one sided. The effects on us culturally, spiritually, politically, and sociologically are devastating. The loss of balance leaves the masculine qualities in a very overbearing position. I would submit that the world we experience looks and functions the way it does because of the imbalance. In the dreams we carry within us collectively, we value the masculine more than the feminine. To put it another way, we like some parts of God and we try to ignore other parts of God. We are Spiritually imbalanced. Saying this is seemingly so very simple, but changing it is much more complicated than you might expect. First, 70% of the population are sensing in their data gathering function. Frankly, they see no reason to change anything. If things are going to change it will take those of the intuitive persuasion to push for the change. Second, many people believe the masculine domination is "natural". This is a belief that must be dispelled. Third, it is hard to overcome tradition, chain of command and what we value in leaders. There is still a deeper issue. The two types, ESTJ and INFP, are respectively the most masculine and feminine of all Myers-Briggs types. However, there are fourteen other types, and each is a mixture of these characteristics. Some will be close to the ESTJ and will seem similarly quite masculine and others will be similar to the INFP and will seem quite feminine, while some will be what I call at "right" angles to both of these types, a sort of near equal mixture of both with a resultant mix of feminine and masculine qualities. What is interesting is that sometimes males will have psychological types that are commonly perceived as more feminine and sometimes females will have psychological types that are perceived as more masculine. When the feminine and masculine qualities of psychological type are concordant with the biological gender I refer to them as the masculine masculine and the feminine feminine. We are all aware of men who seem more feminine in their character, and we are aware of women who seem more masculine in their character. When the feminine and masculine qualities of their psychological type are discordant with their biological gender, I refer to these folks as the feminine masculine and the masculine feminine. For example, if I were a male (biological gender) with an INFP psychological type, I would call this person a feminine masculine. Similarly, if a female (biological gender) had an ESTJ personality type, I would refer to her as a masculine feminine. Most of the time, the deciding factor will be whether decision making functions are "thinking" based or "feeling" based that will differentiate a psychological type as being masculine or feminine respectively. So, you are wondering what's my point? Here it is. In order to value the feminine and masculine we must value all four of these constellations of individuals. Our problem at the moment is we only value highly the masculine masculine constellation. It is clear in our culture that the feminine feminine is important, but not equally valued as the masculine masculine. The feminine masculine male is certainly valuable, but he is under continual assault by the masculine masculine for his perceived deficiency. This is especially a problem for young men. I have watched young feminine masculine men be relentlessly attacked by the masculine masculine men for being "gay". They are constantly in a position of having to defend their "sensitive" side, which is in truth, their gift to mankind. I do believe that as these men age their value becomes more evident as the masculine masculine bravado recedes some and becomes more balanced out. The world would be served much better by a feminine masculine that was seen as being authentically male from an early age instead of having to survive and fight its way to some level of acceptance. Similarly, there is no more lonely woman than the masculine feminine, more at home with men, but clearly not feminine enough for the masculine types, and often rejected by the feminine feminine types who find her to male like, she is left to wander in a circle feeling lost and alone. She is often in the same position as the feminine masculine, perceived as being lesbian, she wonders whether she is, when in truth she is not, she is a remarkable gift to humankind that goes unappreciated, de-valued, and not understood for who she is. The world would be much better off to value the masculine feminine from a young age also. The richness of the world would be greatly increased. It is this deeper complexity that I find lacking in this book. The issues are more complex than we perceive on the surface. I still highly recommend the book, but I would encourage us all to dig much deeper into what we collectively are unaware of . All opinions are those of Curtis Climer, MD Copyright 2011
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