6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tranitus to the Father, April 5, 2010
Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "William Everson: The Shaman's Call"
Whereas Sigmund Freud viewed "archaic" material as pathological, Joseph L. Henderson tells us in the opening pages of Thresholds of Initiation that Jung saw archaic material as merely the fragments, however distorted of a "valid archetypal pattern from which cultural patterns are formed" (4). Henderson postulated the existence of a "culture-complex" as the "mediating force between the primordial unconscious and the cultural forms" (5). In the cultural patterns of every society, are the archetypal thresholds of initiation. Henderson's book is a classic in Jungian literature because it is so unique. He says that if developmental fixations are not worked through in the analysis, they may lead to an initiatory failure later in life, when the call or urge to individuation sounds most clearly during the onset of the second half of life (13). In his own research Henderson discovered a correspondence between the developmental stages of childhood and the initiatory stages that emerge most clearly at mid-life, which suggested to him that there is a complementary relationship between transformative processes in the first and second halves of life, but such complementarity is not experienced in the same way in the two developmental stages. Like Jung, Henderson drew a clear distinction between the maturational stages of childhood development and the transformative stages of initiation in adulthood. Henderson distinguished between individuating processes of childhood development and mature processes of individuation in mid-life and beyond. What are some of obstacles to initiation? In "The Uninitiated" Henderson cited the passive-dependent attitude upon the mother or her substitute as the most frequent cause for the failure of initiation (17). Overcompensating for an underdeveloped masculinity, an uninitiated boy may fall into rage states, either against the mother, or against his own dependent moods, which may be "destructive in the way of a wild animal" (17-18). What such underdeveloped kids need, Henderson says, is an "educational attitude" on the mother's part that is "necessary" if she is to make a man of him (20). So the mother plays an initiatory role in a boy's life, just as the father does, although in the history of male initiation the role of the father is paramount. Nevertheless, if the uninitiated boy resists the mother's education he cannot achieve liberation from the mother and enter the father's world. This is the common problem of the puer aeternus, the eternal boy who is spoiled by his parents and remains hopelessly naive: "His idealism prevents him from knowing that he has any horns to show" (22), Henderson says. The eternal boy is a symptom of a developmental fixation at a matriarchal stage of consciousness, prior to the emergence of the father archetype that makes the transition from the trickster to the hero possible in childhood and adolescence (29). At the lower level of the hero cycle, Henderson finds a state of infantile dependence on the mother; while at the upper level of childhood development he finds an eternal youth figure combining infantile power or pleasure-loving traits, with an attitude of nobility or heroism. In "Return to the Mother" Henderson writes "The universal aim of initiation in tribal societies is to ensure that the novice will renounce all allegiance, even all feeling, toward his mother and be willing to be taken from her to the man's house, where he will meet the trial of strength, set by the tribal fathers, in which he will either achieve manhood or die" (33). Henderson tells us that it comes as something of a surprise to find how many patient's during the course of analysis need and even crave for the "stern discipline" of the father, and how re-education in a psychological sense seems to require a recapitulation of the whole history of our life all the way back to our infancy and beyond, into the primordial depths of the collective psyche (33-34). He then mentions three kinds of return to the mother: 1) passive-regressive and restorative, with little or no appearance of the initiation archetype; 2) transitional between passive-regressive and active-purposive, with partial appearance of the initiation archetype; and 3) active-purposive and transforming, with full cooperation of the initiation archetype (34). Henderson says that "the basic pattern of the [initiation] archetype functions uniformly throughout the whole of life" (123). Nevertheless, the "true initiate cannot remain a father's son only, any more than he remained a mother's son in the beginning." The key of all initiation mysteries is to find a proper balance between the mother and the father. "The theme of failure of initiation" Henderson says, "seems to imply some tendency of the initiate to forget to honor (or even notice) significant vestiges of the old feminine religion of the earth" (152). Henderson says that the following three criteria are never present in youth: 1) separation from the original family clan; 2) commitment to a meaningful group over a long period of time; and 3) liberation from too close an identity with the group (202). This is a book that one can read over and over again.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thresholds of Initiation, October 5, 2005
This review is from: Thresholds of Initiation (Paperback)
I was happy to find this book by psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson. Though published in 1967, it's still useful, particularly on dream images of death and re-birth (chapter VII and following.) He discusses levels of initiation.
I'd known that the bear was a symbol of the feminine/Great Mother, but glad to learn more about it in the appendix, where he links bears and young girls' rites of passage to Athenia as well as Artemis. If you or your friends have dreamed of dancing bears, you might find it interesting.
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