Under Saturn's Shadow Quotes

“When men feel the wound that cannot heal, they either bury themselves in woman's arms and ask her for healing, which she cannot provide, or they hide themselves in macho pride and enforced loneliness.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“One of the bridges between sexes, to be sure, is sex. But men, too often feeling deficient in discourse, place too much emphasis on intercourse.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society. Again, before healing may begin, men must acknowledge the reality of what lies within. Among those confusing emotions is a deep grief for the loss of the personal father as companion, model and support, and a deep hunger for the fathers as a source of wisdom, solace and inspiration.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Whatever sex is, and it is at least a profound mystery, is easily misused. The primary psychological purpose of sex for those men who spend their lives in the cold, cruel world, and whose relationship with their own anima is frigid, is to reconnect with a warm place. Sex is a form of emotional reassurance, a narcotic to still the pain of the bruised soul. If life batters them, then sex, like drugs or work, may numb the wound. The sexual act offers a momentary transcendence. Orgasm can be an ecstatic experience; for the moment one may feel outside the iron confines of ordinary consciousness. It is the closest many men ever come to a religious experience. Thus the act of sex may mask a desperate search for acceptance, underneath whiсh lurks the mother complex.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more homogenous culture than ours. As well, their interest lay not in the individuation of the person but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Our society has long treated men as machines, as bodies expendable in the name of progress or profit. Men have overruled their pain and soul's delight, taught to think of themselves as "mechanisms". Such an estrangement wounds very deeply; it has gone on so long and is so taken for granted that healing individuals, let alone a whole gender, is a dubious undertaking. But the beat goes on, the Saturnian shadow lives, the only game in town, and shame on the defector. The wounding is institutionalized and sanctified, and men unwittingly collude in their own crucifixion.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Ницше как-то заметил, что основной целью брака является беседа. Цель отношений, основанных на взаимном согласии, примером которых являются супружеские,— не заботиться друг о друге (ибо это приведет к активизации детско-родительских комплексов), а способствовать личностному развитию супруга и развиваться вместе с ним.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Nietsche once observed that the primary purpose of marriage was conversation. The purpose of a committed relationship, of which marriage is but one example, is not to take care of each other, to reinforce the parent-child complexes, but to grow through and with each other. Relationship is meant to be dialectical—soulful encounters that temper and enlarge.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“мужчине требуется год посещать психотерапевта, чтобы достичь того состояния, в котором женщина, как правило, начинает терапию,— с точки зрения его способности выражать свои актуальные чувства и переживания" (Роберт Хопке). Мужчины будут выражать свою фрустрацию или говорить о какой-то "внешней проблеме", но они крайне редко смогут внятно рассказать о реальном состоянии своего внутреннего мира. Таково наследие переживаний стыда и самоотчуждения, которые накапливаются у них в душе с самого детства.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Как трудно современным мужчинам без всякой помощи преодолеть великую пропасть! Ритуалы не сохранились, почти не осталось мудрых старейшин, и отсутствует хотя бы какая-то модель перехода мужчины к состоянию зрелости. Поэтому большинство из нас остается при своих индивидуальных зависимостях, хвастливо демонстрируя свою сомнительную мачо-компенсацию, а гораздо чаще страдая в одиночестве от стыда и нерешительности.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Traveller, you have come a long way led by that star.
But the kingdom of the wish is at the other end of the night.
May you fare well, /companero/; let us journey together joyfully
Living on catastrophe, eating the pure light.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“He has recovered the worth of his own soul's journey. His life takes on a new meaning and in his prayer, in the words of Kazantzakis, "is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I found, this how I plan to fight tomorrow.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“And if he does not know the answer he is at least asking the right questions [to himself].”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“The opposite of love is not hatred; it is fear.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Our mythology is full of heroic adventures—mountains climbed, ogres fought, dragons defeated—but it takes even more courage for a man to speak his emotional truths.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of the wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long difficult repentance, realisation of life's mistake,
and the freeing of oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Still, take away such physically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“He was to assume the burden of his journey, its pain and solitude. No one else, parent or tribe, could spare him that journey lest they also steal his capacity to fight for and achieve his full potential.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“He has achieved all he sought, fulfilled the expectations of his culture, but he knows he is a lost man. As Joseph Campbell expressed it, one can spend one's whole life climbing the ladder, only to realize that it had been placed against the wrong wall.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“He did everything he was supposed to do except live his own life, and he was full of rage.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“There is a way out of the labyrinth. Some men do escape the unconscious bonds to the Mother. They are liberated, not from Her, but from their submission to their own longing for rest and sanctuary. But only their daily courage and vigilance, their work on themselves, keeps them from slipping back.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“He found it very difficult to acknowledge that the pattern of false idealization, ambivalence, rejection and abandonment was set up inside himself and projected onto every woman het met.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“The power of the invisible, ineluctable energy of the unconscious, is clearly seen in Joseph's dilemma. He had seen Her, his mother's, disappearing back, and from that single traumatic event had concluded that he could not count on Her.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Every day we stand poised on the razor's edge of consciously suffering the world's wound. How great the temptation to hide in a cave or to sink into some comforting arms. Each morning the grinning gremlins of fear and lethargy return. It does not matter how boldly we sallied forth yesterday; they are back today and, not satisfied to nibble our toes, will gobble our souls if we let them. Thus, we have evolved elaborate ways to avoid the pain of further consciousness.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“Thus the ambivalence of men toward the underworld. They are both fascinated and frightened. Back there lie the origins of healing, the sense, but also annihilation. So they fling the logs of fear and the chance for rapprochement passes.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“So the task is difficult, but it is far preferable to living forever under Saturn's shadow.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“To separate a child from the instinctual world requires a numinous construct at least as powerful as his urge to settle back into unconsciousness.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men

“As a wage-slave a man may be degraded, but he will accept that before being shamed as nonproducing.”
― James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men