REVIEW ESSAY: My Belated Valentine's Day Message

In any event, the more relevant point that he is making is that of necessity there has to be a social dimension to any change and adaptation that we try to work out in our psyches. In short, other people in our social lives have to serve as our helpers as we try to work out changes and adaptations in our psyches.

 

It appears that there are forces in our psyches that want us dead. Perhaps these admittedly destructive forces in our psyches are best understood as neurotic forces.

 

Now, the archetype of initiation described by Moore is characteristically involved in signaling us that the time has come for us to die to our old way of organizing our ego-consciousness and rise to a new way of organizing our ego consciousness -- a new adaptation. In the final analysis then, the archetype of initiation is the life-force within our psyches that tries to drive us toward new life adaptations within our psyches. In short, it does not want us dead, but it does want us to die to the old so that we can rise to the new adaptation toward life.

 

In the posthumously published book THE WAY TO LOVE: MEDITATIONS FOR LIFE (reissued Image, 2012), the Jesuit spiritual director Anthony de Mello (1931-1987) from India writes about this life-force within our psyches. But he refers to the life-force within our psyches as the mystical drive to life, which he contrasts to the neurotic drive to self-destruction (page 125).

 

That's the good news.

 

The bad news is that experiencing the mystical drive to life can be terrifying. He likens the terrifying experience to the experience of withdrawal from drug addiction. As a matter of fact, he likens our attachments to all our old maladaptive learning and functioning to addictions -- bad habits as it were. In other words, we are addicted not to just one drug but to a multiplicity of drugs that he refers to as attachments.

 

So there you have it -- my Valentine's Day message.

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