From the back cover:

Does psychoanalysis have a muse?

Will psychoanalysis and hysteria affect the future of religion?

Psychoanalysis began over a century ago as a treatment for hysteria and it has recently turned its attention to hysteria once again. Provocative and original, The Dove in the Consulting Room engages critically with psychoanalysis—and in particular with the phenomenon of hysteria's return to analysis—from a Jungian perspective, asking such questions as:

• What role does the concept of hysteria play in psychoanalysis?

• What does it say about the concept of the soul, and about analytical culture?

• Does the spiritual aspect of the unconscious have any place in psychoanalysis—the dove any place in the consulting room?

Drawing on the works of Jung, Freud, Hillman, Giegerich, Bollas, and others, the author provides a lively and compelling Jungian analysis of analysis itself—both Freudian and Jungian.

The Dove in the Consulting Room is illuminating reading for the professional analyst and for anyone interested in the spiritual and cultural importance of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology.

Additional Information:

C.G. Jung regarded psychology to have arisen in the wake of the religion that preceded it. As the stars that were the symbols of religion fell, they were sighted again, in sunken form, as that wasteland "heaped with broken images," the unconscious of modernity. In this provocative and original book, visionary in its scope, Greg Mogenson reflects upon the spiritual dimension of the psychoanalytic enterprise or what he calls the dove in the consulting room. Writing from the archetypal perspective of a post-Jungian analytical psychology, the author critically engages psychoanalysis with respect to its recent renewal of interest in that malady with which it began just over a century ago—hysteria. What religion has called soul, and psychoanalysis has called hysteria, Jungian tradition, with a nod to the figure of the inspiratrix or muse, has called the anima. Drawing deeply upon Jung's notion of the anima, James Hillman's re-visioning of psychology in the light of Keats's idea of "soul-making," and Wolfgang Giegerich's theory of psychology as logical negativity, the author provides a rich rejoinder to Christopher Bollas's recently proposed theory of hysteria. Using the latter's consulting room account of hysterical character as a sort of case study in the praxis of theory, the author provides a Jungian analysis of analysis itself (both Freudian and Jungian). In the course of doing this, the spiritual dimension of hysteria and the hysterical dimension of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology are thrown vividly into relief.