“Intergenerational Complexes in Analytical Psychology: The Suffering of Ghosts …This book shows how the cultural unconscious with its multiple group dynamics, identities, nationalities, seething differences of conflicts, polarizations, and individual personalities are organized by cultural complexes and narrated by archetypal story formations, which the author calls ‘phantom narratives’. …” (Amazon.com)
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Background: Since signing up for a FREE Jungian online conference soon to occur, I’ve been flooded with Jungian ads for books, training, etc., most of which I find interesting but not overwhelmingly so.
However when this book and blurb came through about Samuel Kimbles’ The Suffering of Ghosts book it triggered my memories on similar key experiences, from my Shamanic training for alleviating ancestral curses and for providing soul retrievals for clients, as well as ‘ghost removals’; combined with my first-hand witnessing of Past-life hypnotic journeys for clients to personally address ancient ancestral issues still festering in their current lives.
I know that’s a lot of stuff to process, but as strange as it often appears to be, no matter whatever medium of healing or techniques that you might employ, you all are still working with the same cosmic-soup, energetic layers of consciousness—just in different ways as framed through many different ‘healing’ perspectives.
And this “unconscious ancestral open-wounding underlying current social unrest” subject matter seemed to be what the book was alluding to: “…It shows how the cultural unconscious is narrated by archetypal story formations, which the author calls ‘phantom narratives’ …”.
Or a simpler way to say it is that we ALL have ghosts in our attics—and we are still haunted by those long-dead ‘phantom narratives’ that are stuck in both our personal and our collective unconscious which makes us reactively ‘act-out’ individually and collectively around the globe.
But even without being a Jungian analyst addressing this, the ‘phantom narratives’ social disruption causation is such a complex subject that to give it proper context here would be to write pages and pages of explanations on how even these two different training techniques that I’m most familiar with deal with similar client issues but in different ways by comparing those alternative perspectives on the subject matter of dealing with our known layers of consciousness: the sub-conscious (shamanic lower world), consciousness (s. middle world) and the super-conscious (s. upper world).
And because that ‘ghosts in the attic’ theme is such an important topic to consider as social unrest grows around us, I can only explain what little I know of it through my own previous training:
Sequentially I had the Shamanic training first and learned how modern shamans dealt with clients who desired help with alleviating personal issues that physically/mentally presented as possible ‘soul loss’, ‘ancestral trauma’, or ‘other-being occupation’ (often called ‘possession’, but it doesn’t have to be demonic…it could simply be Aunt Susie who upon her death didn’t leave this plane of existence and thought you would be good to ‘hang with’ for awhile.)
For modern shamans, the shamanic practitioner is the agent who deals directly or through Spirit Guide help with whatever ‘original wound’ is found in the past where the soul-part might have fragmented off, and restores the ‘cleansed-and-purified lost soul-part’ back to the client to help them feel more whole again.
Please keep in mind that as weird as this sounds, it actually is effective, but what that ‘work’ entails is all on the practitioner and NOT on the client to research the initial problem, to journey to the true source of the current-life problem in whatever past-life time-period that it first originated for them, and to then create the proper healing situation for all of those involved at that time, especially for the client so that the healing of the problem area then cascades in proper order from origination point in the past-life through all the generations and into the present, etc. (Sorry, but it’s a really complicated procedure.)
However once I learned the hypnosis techniques to take a client through those ‘issue situations’ for themselves that were “seemingly past-life, but are eerily similar to the present”, I could quickly see that having the client see for themselves how the problem had first originated in a previous lifetime, and then talk them through shifting their personal perspective on what was happening at that time to allow for the emotional energy of those old woundings to release to allow for the healing of those past traumas, was far more empowering to the client than the shamanic techniques that I’d been previously trained in.
It seemed to me that the huge difference in healing techniques between the ‘shamanic methods’ and the ‘hypnosis methods’ came down to this: From the shaman ‘telling’ the passive, non-interactive client what was happening to them in that past-life situation and then at the end, explaining to them what I, the practitioner, had done to help alleviate the traumatic situation; to my instead using hypnosis and helping the client journey to the originating wound-creation time period and to the specific situation during that time so the client could see it first-hand and actually feel the emotion at the time of the wounding for themselves. And then let the client energetically heal the original wound themselves by releasing the fear and trauma energies that had accrued back then, and then by forgiving all the participants involved in the client’s past-life personal drama.
In short, from me telling them about it to them seeing/feeling it/healing it for themselves—it was a no-brainer. I quickly determined that using the hypnosis techniques were exponentially greater for shifting higher a client’s overall issues because it self-empowered them to partake in their own healing.
And the other beauty of it was that the way that I did it—how I conducted the session and the past-life explorations was that the client never had to tell me what those personal “issues” were because they silently told their own High Self what those issues were that they wanted to better understand that were creating the problems in their current life; and their High Self then provided the 3 past-lives and the like-wise pertinent situations for the client to review and to examine.
It was simply a magical experience to watch unfold, and I loved doing it when I had the office at the time.
But the prime point here is that I had focused more so on just providing the healing space for clients to discover their cross-generational past-life issues and to show them how to resolve those deep woundings for themselves, without my interference or direct intervention in their past or current lives.
In that role I was strictly the facilitator for helping them in healing themselves rather than the direct healer of their issues. It was a far healthier and more self-empowered healing situation for the client.
And the other important point I wanted to make in this latest epic is that I think that our current social disruption and confrontational political/social environments are directly attributed to what this book describes as ‘phantom narratives’ or “…how the cultural unconscious is narrated by archetypal story formations…”.
And THAT is what needs deep healing for ALL of us!
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Book REFERENCE—
Amazon reviewers:
“Sam Kimbles has once again substantially deepened our understanding of how unconscious dynamics operate in political, social, and cultural and group processes. In this book, he pulls together histories of violence, oppression, and social injustices to present to the reader an emotional field in which psyche generates its own responses and creates conditions for subjectivity grounded in the cultural unconscious. … – Andrew Samuels, former professor of analytical psychology, University of Essex, and author of ‘The Political Psyche’
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“If your ghosts were stolen from Africa, sold into slavery, or were indigenous peoples deprived of their lands, or immigrants fleeing poverty, famine, and war or Jewish refugees from the Nazis, Central American refugees from gangs, all of you have terrible stories to tell. How do those of us who work with human suffering treat your pain? How do we heal the severed feeling of kinship in our culture, our recognition of each other as fellow citizens, all of us carriers of ancestral trauma? These are among the questions Samuel Kimbles addresses in his wise and compassionate book. . . . The Suffering of Ghosts is a major contribution to Jungian thought, a profound and hopeful call to bring what Jungians know about working with the unconscious into the social and cultural realm. If your ghosts are agitated, moaning and muttering, rolling over in their graves, read them this book. They will thank you for it.” – Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of ‘The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung: Getting the Word from Within’
FINDING YOUR TRUTH 