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From Chrysalis to Butterfly
In her new book, Marcia D-S. Dobson offers a new paradigm for self-development and self-realization through her recuperative process of locating liminal spaces in ancient Greek texts and in psychoanalytic practice—spaces that proved to be both transpersonal and transformative. Daringly original within an admirable latitude of academic discipline and convention, Dobson shows us myriad perspectives on the human psyche and how we have evolved historically and philosophically. Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life was not worth living, and when asked to sum up all of his philosophical imperatives in a single phrase, he replied: “Know thyself.” Accordingly, Dobson uses her self-experience and the experience of others through personal challenges and tasks (as the mythic Psyche was made to perform tasks to reunite with Eros), as well as her salient resilience to formulate new truths. Robustly re-enacted in dreams, reverie, scholarship, and clinical practice, Dobson presents the possibilities of relinquishing her attachment to the personal mother she so “intimately struggled with” and “ambivalently tied up with [her] own transferences and projections” (p. 91), accessing the female archetype flowing through maternal love and attachment. This epiphany proved transformational when she was able to overcome the pain of grief by keeping the dead alive in the imaginal realm of her imagination and allowing her in as a part of her own psychic self-structure.
Our most essential understandings of the world are founded not on exclusively rational logic but rather on intuition, a world of sensation. This is what Dobson calls “liminality” when engaging a psychic space outside the boundaries of ego organization, and going so far as to test the veracity of a bounded self. Evocative, often poetic, language enriches her personal narrative and detailed case analyses of her patients in the last section of the book. Throughout, she hones her thesis: the r