Psychic Energy

Rating:
Summary: Psychic Energy -- a misleading title
Review: Given today's New Age flavor, Esther Harding's title, Psychic Energy, could easily be misleading. Psychic Energy is not a New Age book, but a serious consideration of very deep human psychological and psyche conditions and conditioning. Esther Harding was a leading psychoanalyst in the 1920s. Her knowledge, experience and perceptions rank with Marion Woodman and Eric Erickson. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to probe more deeply into the human psyche for fresh explanations of who we are and how we come to be.

Rating:
Summary: Psychic Energy -- a misleading title
Review: Given today's New Age flavor, Esther Harding's title, Psychic Energy, could easily be misleading. Psychic Energy is not a New Age book, but a serious consideration of very deep human psychological and psyche conditions and conditioning. Esther Harding was a leading psychoanalyst in the 1920s. Her knowledge, experience and perceptions rank with Marion Woodman and Eric Erickson. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to probe more deeply into the human psyche for fresh explanations of who we are and how we come to be.

Rating:
Summary: psychization as colonization
Review: I enjoyed Harding's insightful and profound and yet readable style and her excursions into the Jungian perspective; her historical sense was also enjoyable. However, speaking theoretically, the Jungian tendency which came ultimately from Freud and which she shares, namely to reduce psyche to a rarefied, neutralized, "psychized" form of instinct, troubles me.

Perhaps we should see through this to the heroic fantasy below: the pioneer and missionary out to colonize the wild natives. Where there was instinct, there shall consciousness be.