The Middle Passage (STUDIES IN JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY BY JUNGIAN ANALYSTS)

by James Hollis

Book Overview

Author James Hollis?s eloquent reading provides the listener with an accessible and yet profound understanding of a universal condition?or what is commonly referred to as the Mid-life crisis. The book... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0919123600
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Inner City Books
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.3" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

This is THE book for midlife

Don't buy this book when you are in your 20's or early 30's. But at some point--it varies with the individual--we're ready to look more closely, to see what's behind the curtain. (That's a reference to the Wizard of Oz. If you haven't seen that, you're way too young to read this book.)In our early life, we try do do what's right. We follow the rules. Our parents rules, society's rules, our friends' expectations--we're not too sure whose rules sometimes. The result is that we are living someone else's idea of a life. We can do this for a long time. But at some point, we realize that our life doesn't fit us. Why should it? It's not our life!Panic seems like a reasonable thing to do at that point. So does depression.James Hollis points out the processes behind our midlife. Opens up the big questions. Points out how midlife is our best opportunity to reorient--to start living our own life.There are very few people on the planet I would call wise. James Hollis is one of them.This book is amazing. Buy it... when it's time.

The Quest for Personal Meaning

This short, superb book is one of the best works on midlife that I've ever read. Hollis is NOT offering simple answers or formulas; instead, he's making clear just how difficult but rewarding the Middle Passage (as he names it) can be. I especially appreciate his oft-repeated dictum that the goal of life isn't Happiness so much as it is Meaning. Isn't this perpetual struggle to find & grasp an elusive happiness precisely what gets so many of us tied up in knots? His insistence that we must be willing to go into our own dark places, that we must be willing to acknowledge & discard out illusions, is far better advice than most of the Self-Help industry offers ... and far more helpful. A book that provokes thought & reflection, this slim volume of inner treasure is highly recommended!

A powerful, insightful book

I have dozens of books that I recommend to clients, and a few that I suggest to friends. There's only one I have given as a gift a half-dozen to a dozen times. This is it. Hollis is an insightful therapist with a hopeful AND realistic perspective on mid-life and the difficulties that can beset us as we realize that "this is it", that we're not preparing for adulthood anymore, that we are there and better make something of it. He is also a gifted writer who can take Jungian theory and bring it down to earth, explaining it clearly without oversimplifying. (I'm more of a hard-nosed research-based cognitive-behavioural type myself, and I still think the book is brilliant.) Best of all, he is a judicious self-editor. Too many self-help books have one idea that gets padded out to 300 pages. (In the process of writing one of my own, I came across dozens of bad examples.) Hollis is concise and clear. The text of the book is 117 pages, worth twice as much for being half as thick as he could have made it.My suggestion: Buy it, read it, apply it, and then go buy copies for your mid-life friends' birthdays. On a selfish note, it's great not to be stuck for 40th birthday present ideas any more.

Taking the Mystery Out of Mid-Life Misery

After a lifetime of steadfastly holding onto increasingly ineffective ways of dealing with life and its disappointments (large and small), I finally cracked and landed smack in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Divorce, depression, anxiety, and a total loss of comprehension about life's purpose were the wreckage of a lifetime of disowning my authentic self in order to meet the high expectations of others and of our culture in general. As I began to read "The Middle Passage," it was as though a curtain had been opened to reveal a new possibility and the normalcy of the process of mid-life introspection, pain, discovery, and rejuvenation. It's a "let's grow up" book, and through its compassionate prose and honest voice it invites one to risk a journey that, otherwise, one might never choose to take.

If you want to not be insane and bitter past 50, read this!

This is the BEST book about getting safely to the other side of 50. If is NOT pop-psyche or New Age. It is solid Jungian psychology. It is written to and for an educated audience but is jargon free. His prose is very good. It is a short book and therefore one that actually can be read in a couple of sittings. It shows the process of how one develops survival mechanisms at an early age that become threadbare in adulthood, but are very hard to recognize and change without some honest reflection and hard work. But he makes an excellent case that failing to do the work leads to a deepening of the misery one often experiences at the onset of mid-life. Hollis tells the reader what must be done, and makes it seem exciting rather than painful.