February / March 2004

FOCUSING: Selected Essays 1974-1999 BY NEIL FRIEDMAN
Xlibris, 2000, 348 pp., $22.99, ISBN: 0738812331.
Reviewed by John Rowan

Eugene Gendlin’s discovery of the experiential technique of Focusing has now spread to thirtyone countries, and the basic book has been translated into ten languages. This is a book about the life and work of one practitioner. It explains what Focusing is, and how it works, and what it is like to experience it.

Like some other experiential approaches (Mahrer 2002), Focusing can be practiced on one’s own, without the need for a therapist. Some of the most interesting episodes in this book are examples of Friedman working on himself. This follows a humanistic tradition. And like other humanistic practitioners, he believes in the real self. “The real self is lived experience as it is presently felt.” He links strongly with other humanistic practitioners, showing how focusing can be used informally to enrich other approaches and make them stronger.

There are also a number of extracts from therapy sessions, showing exactly how Focusing can be used to illuminate and transform painful experiences. What these extracts also make clear is that the Focusing practitioner is humble. If he gets it wrong, he stands to be corrected. There is a refreshing honesty about this book.

Friedman is not a purist. He adopts an integrative style, which enables him to use techniques from bioenergetics, gestalt, object relations, person-centered work, and so on. Also he adopts a nondefensive style: “A gives me advice on how to get my avocado to grow. I suggest to M that she read Maya Angelou’s autobiography. H and I share a joke. I make D a cup of coffee. R recommends I see the movie Swept Away. B and I discuss the financing of condominiums. L shows me his sleeping bag. R and I gossip . . . sometimes I help clients devise behavioral strategies for change.”

He discusses catharsis. It is not enough, he says, to simply give permission for this: it is so much against the general rules of our culture that the client actually has to be given a lot of encouragement: the therapist has to lend the client some of his energy if the thing (catharsis) is to happen. Friedman is fond of group work, and often leads workshops at a couple of favorite centers.

He finishes the book by talking about meditation and miracles.

I loved this book, and would like it to be read by many people. I can’t think of a single therapist who would not find it interesting and useful.

JOHN ROWAN, an AHP member since 1970, works in London as a psychotherapist and teaches at the Minster Centre. His latest book, co-written with Michael Jacobs, is The Therapist’s Use of Self.

THE HOLY LONGING: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Yearning BY CONNIE ZWEIG
J. P. Tarcher, 2003, 238 pp., $23.95, ISBN: 1585422045.
Reviewed by Bob Boucek

As an overburdened graduate student of psychology, I hesitated when asked to review this book. Yet the title enchanted me, whispering intimations about my own “spiritual yearning,” wrestled with for the last decade. I tucked the book away in my overfilled satchel, waiting for a time to indulge beyond the mundane, hoping not to find myself with another academic chore.

When the day finally came, I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store. Connie Zweig’s personalized prologue immediately sparked my interest—a humorous, honest account of her own youthful enthusiasm for the fledgling meditation movement taking root in America, a young idealist filled with the New Age naivete, that one-sided focus on light, love, and “transcendence.” Fortuitously, a growing disenchantment with the shadowy egos of her community caused her to listen to her own soul and her own questioning, which had been suppressed by hopeful devotion. And from this nagging disenchantment arose an honoring of her maturing spirituality, and the narrative of this wonderful book.

This book is a welcome guidepost for psychologists, scholars, and seekers concerned with a mature, honest, and penetrating spirituality. Rather than presenting a one-sided glimpse of the heights and the benefits of spirituality for psychological well-being, Zweig embraces the holy longing, riding it through the peaks and down into the dark underbelly of today’s spiritual realities. Drawing upon the foundations of Freud, Jung, Kohut, and Wilber, with elucidating insights and examples from a variety of religious traditions, Zweig offers a thorough and engaging look into the psychology of spiritual aspirants, the shadows of fallen gurus, and the dark side of religious communities. She shows the need to aspire to the heights with spiritual practice and contemplation, and the need to examine our personal unconscious and the archetypal shadows that hinder a mature spiritual engagement with our world.

With reference to the work of Ken Wilber, she traces the pathway of the religious instinct, from prepersonal and personal ego development, into the transpersonal. Rather than reducing spirituality to the template of unmet childhood needs, she more appropriately shows how one’s personal dynamics can influence the lens through which one sees (or feels their way toward) the imago dei. Moreover, she offers poignant examples of how these early dynamics influence one’s relationship with spiritual leaders. Finally, she offers a startling elucidation of how this “holy longing is a two-faced archetype, with a light side and a dark side.”

Zweig circumambulates the archetype of holy longing with poetry and insight. She sees the religious instinct muted, suppressed, or expressed through addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, or a devotion to endless consumerism. In less destructive modes of being, she renders the impulse visible in fantasies for beloved soulmates or for Hestia to create the perfect, paradisal home. However, Zweig points us to an approach of greater mindfulness:

To the degree that we do not take our longing into our own souls where it truly belongs and suffer it through as a rite of passage, we will be compelled to live it out literally to the bitter end—and to live only and always in painful longing. But if we can acknowledge our religious yearning and even befriend it, and if we can detect the hidden objects of our desire, perhaps we can follow our holy longing to a higher end.

By looking at the images of our longing, we can become conscious of the ways in which “they may haunt us like ancestral ghosts.” With numerous examples, she reveals how in our subjective contemplation:

As we imagine the divine, we reject certain traits, which get banished into the demonic. And in this way we disown both the light of the god-image and the darkness of Satan. Therefore, if our godimages do not evolve, our shadow images remain static as well, narrowing the range in which we can live our conscious lives.

She expounds and clarifies this shadow dynamic with excellent case examples. She shows how rigid adherence to Buddhist imagoes of nonattachment conflict with conscious intentions to seek intimate personal relationships, and how a fixed image of a harsh father god can perpetuate feelings of guilt and unworthiness.

This book offers an unflinching meeting with the spiritual shadow. She uncovers countless examples of spiritual abuse, from the wellknown pedophilia of numerous Catholic clergy, to sexual misconduct of Eastern swamis and Buddhist masters, to accounts of alcoholism, money laundering, and other abuses of power among modern “sages.” The laundry list of countless leaders’ mistakes are a cautionary wakeup to blind, uncritical devotion. However, Zweig also shows how the dynamics of isolation, the burden of carrying the projection of the Self, and the yearning to step out of these demanding and powerfully inflationary roles create susceptibility to the damaging abuses (of self and other) in some of our spiritual leaders. She details the devastating effects of boundary violations. She gives adept analyses of the gurudisciple relationship, describes the personalities prone to spiritual abuse, and shows the need for the spiritually adept to focus on developmental lines outside of the spiritual. Unresolved personal dynamics play themselves out even with “enlightened” people.

In addition to her excellent case examples, Zweig enriches her work with documentation and research. Unfortunately, with no bibliography, the sources are not easily accessible to those who wish to investigate this literature in greater depth. Nonetheless, this profoundly sobering work promotes insight and critical selfexamination of the blind spots within one’s own spirituality. It will be immensely helpful for the therapist working with spiritually abused clients, or with those blooming in naive enthusiasm. Zweig’s work is also a must-read not only for spiritual aspirants but also for their leaders who are struggling with issues they may be unaware of. In the current literature on psychology and spirituality, The Holy Longing is a gem.

BOB BOUCEK is enrolled in the Integrative Psychology emphasis as a Psy.D. candidate at the California School of Professional Psychology, the San Diego campus of Alliant International University. He can be contacted at stillflow@sbcglobal.net.