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Rating: 
Summary: Primary colors and then some
Review: Graham Jackson's book, "The Living Room Mysteries" was recommended to me by a friend who is a Jungian therapist. Having spent a couple of years exploring my own dreams it was good to look at a new concept of male relationships. I must admit that I haven't read Jackson's prelude book, "The Secret Lore of Gardening" but I nonetheless found some things from which to take from his second book. Placing men on axes of blue-red and green-yellow, Jackson proceeds to describe what a "typical" male resembles when primarily attached to one color. In this book, he gives over to the red-blue axis. "The Living Room Mysteries" requires patience to get through. A good deal of information is revealed in-depth and it gets a little tiresome on occasion. It is a book that one can put down for a while, but it's also worth coming back to again. I'm sure most readers try to identify themselves with one or more colors as I did. Jackson's conclusions seem to be the best part of his work....namely that while we may be primarily associated with one color we probably have a little of everything in us and those colors can change over time. By the way, I think I'm basically red with some blue thrown in for balance.
Rating:
Summary: Primary colors and then some
Review: Graham Jackson's book, "The Living Room Mysteries" was recommended to me by a friend who is a Jungian therapist. Having spent a couple of years exploring my own dreams it was good to look at a new concept of male relationships. I must admit that I haven't read Jackson's prelude book, "The Secret Lore of Gardening" but I nonetheless found some things from which to take from his second book. Placing men on axes of blue-red and green-yellow, Jackson proceeds to describe what a "typical" male resembles when primarily attached to one color. In this book, he gives over to the red-blue axis. "The Living Room Mysteries" requires patience to get through. A good deal of information is revealed in-depth and it gets a little tiresome on occasion. It is a book that one can put down for a while, but it's also worth coming back to again. I'm sure most readers try to identify themselves with one or more colors as I did. Jackson's conclusions seem to be the best part of his work....namely that while we may be primarily associated with one color we probably have a little of everything in us and those colors can change over time. By the way, I think I'm basically red with some blue thrown in for balance.
Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful and delicate account of male intimacy patterns.
Review: Jackson presents his typology of male intimacy patterns. Reminiscent of C G Jung's "Personality Types", Jackson uses his blue and red types to explain the phenomenon of (gay) male patterns in metropolitan life. Jackson identified the green and yellow types in his previous volume "The Secret Lore of Gardening", and now he approaches a more dangerous and shifting alchemy in male-male relationships. Cutting through the obsenity of new age and pop psych garbage popularly ranting on "what it means to be gay" or "the gay psyche", Jackson is not only trained and experienced to speak on the topic, he is also thoughtful and aware of the perilousness of the polarization present in such relationships. He identifies what may be at the core of male to male effiminacy and emasculation, and how this post-modern attempt that gay men stumble upon (as Percifal and the Grail King did in the 12th Century)is really a psychic meeting of the mother complex and the father complex to sqare off (and possibly account for, in this terribly deprived language we have, homosexual eros and amore). I reccomend this book to the lay Jungian and depth psych nut. I stumbled upon it with a little introduction from Walker, Hopcke, and Thompson-but would have been able to navigate through Jackson's words and ideas just as well without. Side by side Robert A Johnson's "We", Jackson's volumes enlighten the powerful and most idealized experience for us in the west-"Falling in Love". See also Johnson's essay in Hopcke's "Same Sex Love:A Path to Wholeness" for a likewise uncluttered and sustaining attempt at bringing consciousness to gay male love. This and the previous book by Jackson are difficult to find and buy. A true gem for gay hearts.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful and delicate account of male intimacy patterns.
Review: Jackson presents his typology of male intimacy patterns. Reminiscent of C G Jung's "Personality Types", Jackson uses his blue and red types to explain the phenomenon of (gay) male patterns in metropolitan life. Jackson identified the green and yellow types in his previous volume "The Secret Lore of Gardening", and now he approaches a more dangerous and shifting alchemy in male-male relationships. Cutting through the obsenity of new age and pop psych garbage popularly ranting on "what it means to be gay" or "the gay psyche", Jackson is not only trained and experienced to speak on the topic, he is also thoughtful and aware of the perilousness of the polarization present in such relationships. He identifies what may be at the core of male to male effiminacy and emasculation, and how this post-modern attempt that gay men stumble upon (as Percifal and the Grail King did in the 12th Century)is really a psychic meeting of the mother complex and the father complex to sqare off (and possibly account for, in this terribly deprived language we have, homosexual eros and amore). I reccomend this book to the lay Jungian and depth psych nut. I stumbled upon it with a little introduction from Walker, Hopcke, and Thompson-but would have been able to navigate through Jackson's words and ideas just as well without. Side by side Robert A Johnson's "We", Jackson's volumes enlighten the powerful and most idealized experience for us in the west-"Falling in Love". See also Johnson's essay in Hopcke's "Same Sex Love:A Path to Wholeness" for a likewise uncluttered and sustaining attempt at bringing consciousness to gay male love. This and the previous book by Jackson are difficult to find and buy. A true gem for gay hearts.
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