We are listening to a book read and written by James Hollis called “The Middle Passage” which title denotes our passage to full adulthood prompted by a call of our psyche for authenticity in our middle age. Chapter One covers fairly familiar ground for those grounded in a psychological/coaching paradigm albeit from a Jungian perspective – i.e. we are with our particular lenses because of how we have been raised by mom and dad. Our personality has evolved as a defence by ourselves as children when we were overwhelmed by life or else hurt in some way. The defence is limiting because it was formed by us as very small children with very limited means of interpreting the world.
Hollis quotes lots of poetry and recalls some of our great artists over the centuries who have expressed this bind we find ourselves of living out a life not of our conscious choosing. With this as his theme, Hollis writes about the ‘tragic flaw’ in the heroes of the old Greek tragedies and he renames this as ‘wounded vision.’ Of course this is also a beautiful reframing in that it offers the opportunity for healing and purposefully adjusting or vision — surely what is to come in the rest of the book…..