It is not enough to challenge us to get involved.  Who is the one who acts?  The Chinese wisdom said, "If you would change the world, change the state; if you would change the state, change the family; if you would change the family, change yourself."  This is the hallmark of depth psychology.  I cannot point my finger at others without knowing that most, if not all, of what I perceive is a reflection of my own Shadow.  Jung's model was to not preach the light, but to learn how to take the light into the darkness of my own unconscious.   That is where healing occurs.  With healing, there is less projection and judgment of those around me.  It is not until mid-life that the heart of this work typically takes place.  If you were fortunate enough to wake-up in your earlier years, and to pay attention to what you discovered about yourself, there will still be this developmental stage as you move from being closer to your beginning to being closer to your ending.

     James Hillman has written often of this classical struggle between the Puer complex, the Eternal Youth in our soul, and the Senex, or Chronos who devours new life.   In the Jungian tradition, Hillman is not as interested in a cure so much as the awareness of the split that exists, "tearing the soul apart."  It is this awareness that brings healing and the main work of analysis.  As I have written elsewhere, it is not for ourselves alone that we seek such healing.  

Hillman challenges that the transformation of attitude and personality that comes with depth analysis of the individual effects the collective pattern, even history itself (Hillman, J. 1979. Puer Papers.  Dallas: Spring Publications.

     Hillman, and his more popular student, Thomas Moore, continue to provoke rationalistic psychology with the idea that we must learn to honot the mystery of our own souls.      The therapeutic goal to become a well-adjusted personality is seductive.  Who will judge when you have reached that goal?   What price will the split-off aspects of your own personality pay in the process?  To be sure, it is not so easy and clear a path to seek your own way into and through the darkness.  In the myth of the search for the Holy Grail, each of the Knights of the Roundtable were given the direction that they must enter the dark forest in a place that no one had gone before, each finding his own way and facing his own fears.  There is no other way.  You will encounter teachers and gurus, sages and charlatans, friends and foes who will be your guides.  In an addictive society you will find multiple distractions from the suffering of a soul being torn apart.  In those moments when you allow yourself to be silent and still, listen to the call to the "place of something more."  It is your soul's cry.