In any event, I have written about John F. Kennedy in my OEN article "John F. Kennedy Was a Compulsive Womanizer" (dated November 29, 2024; viewed 1,828 times as of July 21, 2025):
Now, after Robert Moore of the Chicago Theological Seminary had gained national fame in the 1990s, Max J. Havlick, Jr. of World Community Enterprises (formerly the Faculty Secretary at the Chicago Theological Seminary), took it upon himself to edit three compilations of Robert Moore's materials from the 1980s:
(1) The Archetype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation: Lectures and Essays by Robert L. Moore (Xlibris Corporation, 2001; the first three chapters are edited texts of lectures that Robert Moore gave in Chicago in the spring of 1984; the next two chapter cover material he presented in the fall of 1985; chapter 6 is an essays of his that is reprinted in this volume, and chapter 7 is another essay of his along the same lines [pp. 14-15]);
(2) The Magician and the Analyst: The Archetype of the Magus in Occult Spirituality and Jungian Analysis (Xlibris Corporation, 2002; a research monograph that Robert Moore presented to the Faculty of the C. G. Institute of Chicago in April 1987 [p. 24, note 1]);
(3) Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity (Chiron Publications, 2003).
In Robert Moore's 2001 book The Archetype of Initiation, he discusses prison imagery twice (pp. 121 and 131). On pages 120-121, he discusses the 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar, starring Diane Keaton as the young woman "who goes out to the singles bars at night and looks for the most dangerous men she can find to seduce. He thinks he has seduced her, but she is the one who has seduced him. She takes him home and has sex with him, mad, passionate, manipulative sex, and then she rejects him. But as you know, she gets killed during the acting out of one of her unconscious ritualizations" (p. 120). Robert Moore then goes on to analyze various aspects of the young woman's personality in terms of the true-self versus the false-self issue. Robert Moore concludes his analysis of the young woman with the following broad statement: "We moderns [as distinct from premoderns, presumably] try to maintain that false self as much as we can, but the more false-self there is in the constitution of a person's personality, the more imprisonment of the true self there is. It is under a repression barrier. The person lives largely out of the false-self organization [of the person's personality]. The true self, however, is always trying to make itself heard" (p. 121).
Subsequently, Robert Moore uses prison imagery again. He says, "The true self speaks from the inner prison, and the true self knows the truth [about the person's personality]" (p. 131).
Robert Moore's statement about the prison imagery and about the true self speaking from the inner prison calls to mind Ong's perceptive essay "St. Ignatius' Prison-Cage and the Existentialist Question" in the Jesuit-sponsored journal Theological Studies, volume 15, number 1 (March 1954): pp. 34-51. Ong reprinted it in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Studies and Essays (Macmillan, pp. 242-259). It is also reprinted in volume two of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1992b, pp. 52-67).
Now, in Robert Moore's 2002 book The Magician and the Analyst, he says, among other things, "We should be able to discern some common elements which seem to link the experiences of these individuals with those whose encounter with the archetype of initiation occurred during either the acute phase of a psychotic episode or the experience of religious conversion" (p. 45).
In light of Robert Moore's statement here, I now interpret my hypomanic episode in late February 1974, which I have discussed briefly above, as my encounter with the archetype of initiation.
In addition, in light of Robert Moore's statement here, I now interpret the famous religious conversion of St. Ignatius Loyola as his encounter with the archetype of conversion. (I discuss St. Ignatius Loyola below.)
Now, in Robert Moore's endnote 2 in Chapter 3: "Initiation and the Magus: Archetypal Dynamics of Transformative Space" in his 2002 book The Magician and the Analyst (pp. 41-82), he says, "I am indebted to Professor Thomas Helm of Western Illinois University for his insights into the radical shift in language during the course of the modernization process. It is difficult for us moderns to imagine the loss of potency of the spoken word which occurred when the printed word became available to the general public. Printing presses issued in [ushered in?] a radical domestication of the potency of language and the word. To understand premodern religious and ritual process, one has to try to imagine a world in which correctly spoken words were potent and powerful - pregnant with transformative power. Both word and image in a ritual context carries power - as Jung would put it, a mana - which he experienced as a numinous mysterium tremendum. This 'tremendous mystery' was stewarded by those with the necessary esoteric knowledge to relate to it in useful ways - the magician or ritual elder of the [premodern] culture" (pp. 70-71).
Now, in the present wide-ranging and, at times, deeply personal OEN article, I want to focus here on Robert Moore's grim but accessible 2003 book Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity. Yes, "the Dragon" is a vivid image for "Grandiosity." Yes, I say here that Robert Moore's 2003 book is grim because of the number of social and global problems that he refers to and that he sees as caused by various human beings who are suffering from one grandiose "shadow" form of another of the sixteen "shadow" forms of the eight archetypes of maturity in the human psyche. The number of personal, social, and global problems that he mentions in his 2003 book is daunting, to say the least. For example, Robert Moore repeatedly expresses his concern about the climate crisis in his lectures from the 1980s (pp. x, 2, 48-49, 108-109, 114, 126-127, 161-162, 209, and 221) - decades before Pope Francis (1936-2025) issued his widely read 2015 eco-encyclical Laudato si' (available in English and other languages at the Vatican's website) - and decades before Donal Trumps' victory in the 2016 presidential election.
In connection with the climate crisis, I would also call your attention to something that Robert Moore says in Chapter 3: "Regulating Dragon Energies" in his 2003 book Facing the Dragon (pp. 45-59). He says, "These projects symbolize something important happening in the world today. If [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin was correct that there is a burgeoning planetary consciousness, then you would assume one spin-off from that would be some improvement in communications. We may soon have much greater potential for communication among the various religions of the world" (p. 47).
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