Now, I now interpret my ten-week experience of feeling mildly euphoric in the fall of 2024 as involving my accessing the optimal and positive form of the feminine Magician/Shaman archetype of maturity in my psyche.
In any event, from the time of my mental breakdown and hospitalization in late February 1974 to today, I have seen twenty different psychotherapists over the years, including Robert Moore (in 2007), with various professional credentials, for one-to-one psychotherapy involving different problems. Thus, I am a well-therapized person.
In addition, during the years when I was in the Jesuits (1979-1987), I saw twenty different Jesuits in the context of one-to one spiritual direction.
Now, in both the context of one-to-one psychotherapy and of one-to-one spiritual direction, I did most of the talking - about my experiences and my feelings. I do not recall being asked very many questions in either context. In spiritual direction, I did usually receive brief comments from each spiritual director at the end of each session, but in psychotherapy, I rarely received any comments in most of the sessions. Put differently, for the most part, my many sessions with psychotherapists were not dialogues - and even many sessions of spiritual direction in the Jesuits were not dialogues, even though they typically included some feedback at the end of the session. Now, my extensive practice of speaking monologically in psychotherapy sessions over the years and my additional experience of speaking monologically in spiritual direction during my years in the Jesuits helped prepare me for writing some 680 seemingly monological OEN articles since I retired from teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth at the end of May 2009. However, I typically extensively revise my seemingly monological OEN articles as I write them. In this way, they are not as clearly monological as my talking in face-to-face psychotherapy sessions was and as my talking face-to-face in spiritual direction was.
Now, as a result of my extensive experience of talking monologically in psychotherapy over the years and of my extensive experience of spiritual direction during my years in the Jesuits, I am today deeply accustomed to being highly inspective about my life and my experiences - as I am in the present wide-ranging and, at times, deeply personal OEN article - and as I have been about various other aspects of my life in certain other deeply personal OEN articles.
Now, I also want to discuss my monologic OEN articles here in terms of the title of Ong's massively researched 1958 scholarly masterpiece Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press). The French Renaissance logician Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was also an educational reformer and a Protestant martyr. In any event, the Art of Reason that Ong sees Ramus as pioneering involved setting forth one's own thoughts and point of view with explicitly adverting to someone's position - as the Art of Discourse for centuries in our Western cultural history did. My monologic OEN articles do indeed involve me is setting forth my own point of view. However, I invariably mention others and their points of view in my OEN articles, so in this regard, my OEN articles resemble the Art of discourse more than the Art of Reason.
Now, for a discussion of dialogicality in the context of one-to-one psychotherapy, see Pete Walker's subsection "Dialogicality" in Chapter 2: "Facilitating Relational Repair and Development" in his new 2024 book Holistically Treating Complex PTSD: A Six-Dimensional Approach: Guidance for Therapists, Coaches, and Other Helpers to Repair the Damage and Arrested Development Suffered by Childhood Trauma Survivors (pp. 74-77), mentioned above.
In any event, I am today far more articulate than I was in late February 1974 and early March 1974 when I was hospitalized as a result of my mental breakdown, and I attribute my far more developed articulateness today to my years of one-to-one psychotherapy between 1974 and 2007 and my years on one-to-one spiritual direction in the Jesuits (1979-1987).
Now, at the time of my mental breakdown and hospitalization in late February 1974, I was not accustomed to being highly introspective. At the time of my mental breakdown in late February 1974, I was involved in what turned out to be a short but intense affair with a fellow graduate student (but in a different field of study) named Sue, who lived in the same apartment building. After I was released from the hospital in early March 1974, she renewed our relationship, but she ended our affair before the end of March 1974. I don't blame her for ending our short but intense affair, because I really was not a pleasant person for her to be around in March 1974.
In any event, after I was released from the hospital, I was grumbling about the prospect of seeing my psychiatrist once a month for psychotherapy. Prompted by my grumbling about that prospect, my friend Sue one evening called and asked if she could come up to my apartment. I said she could. When she arrived, she entered my apartment and promptly took a seat in a swivel chair and indicated that she had something to say. She then told me about her years of sexual promiscuity as a girl and about how her boyfriend and his buddies gang raped her when she was a pregnant teenager. Her parents were supportive. She carried the pregnancy to term and then put the child up for adoption. At the end of recounting this difficult story to me, she said that she would welcome the opportunity to talk with a psychiatrist about her life in the context of psychotherapy.
As you may imagine, I had never heard any other woman talk so openly and candidly about her years of sexual promiscuity. As I listened to my friend Sue talk about her years of sexual promiscuity and her gang rape by her boyfriend and his buddies, I listened to her with empathy. Never before in my life, or ever again in my life to this day, have I listened to any other woman with such a strong sense of empathy for her - or to any man for that matter. The strong sense of empathy that I felt for my friend Sue as I listened to her recount the difficult story of her sexual promiscuity as a girl and her gang rape by her boyfriend and his buddies was one of the most extraordinary and memorable experiences of my life. In any event, my capacity for empathy is still alive and well.
Ah, but what exactly is empathy? For a discussion of empathy, I turn to the subsection titled "1. EMPATHY" (pp. 269-270) in Pete Walker's Chapter 13: "A Relational Approach to Healing Abandonment" (pp. 265-293) in his book titled Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (An Azure Coyote Book, 2014). In that subsection on empathy, Pete Walker says, "In terms of definition, I especially like [Heinz] Kohut's statement that: 'Empathy involves immersing yourself in another's psychological state by feeling yourself into the other's experience'" (p. 269). Pete Walker also says, "Of the many benefits of empathy, the greatest is perhaps that it models and teaches self-empathy, better known as self-acceptance" (p. 270).
I think that my self-empathy over the years has been sufficient to produce self-acceptance. However, I will let you judge for yourself my self-acceptance as you read the more deeply personal parts of the present wide-ranging and, at times, deeply personal OEN article. Of course, because Robert Moore discusses grandiosity, you may also judge for yourself whether or not, or to what degree, my writing in the present wide-ranging and, at times, deeply personal OEN article is an expression of my grandiosity.
In any event, in the same Chapter 13 in Pete Walker's 2024 book Complex PTSD, Pete Walker subsequently says, "For those survivors [of childhood abandonment feelings] whose self-expression was especially decimated by caretaker, self-focused verbal exploration typically needs to be the dominant activity for a great deal of time. Without this, the unformed healthy ego has no room to grow and break free from the [inner] critic. The client's healthy sense of self remains imprisoned beneath the hegemony of the outsized superego" (p. 276). This analysis strikes me as applying to me as I started seeing psychotherapists for psychotherapy from late February 1974 onward in my life up to about 2007.
Now, I have discussed Pete Walker's 2014 book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving in my OEN article titled "You Are Suffering from Complex PTSD" (dated November 4, 2017; viewed 2,249 times as of July 21, 2025):
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