Confessions of an Introvert
The Solitary Path to Emotional Maturity
Author: D. Stephenson Bond
Release date: November 20, 2018
Price: $23.95
Pages: 312
ISBN: 978-0-9823079-9-1
Formats: 6 X 9 quality paperback, Kindle edition, EPub edition
Description: Around Christmas, 1971, D. Stephenson Bond encountered a near-death experience which changed his life at age fifteen. For the next fifty years he studied religion and psychology in the pursuit of coming to terms with the true meaning of his experience. His outward journey stretched from the backwoods of West Virginia to psychoanalytic training in Boston and the dotcom world of Silicon Alley in New York, but the inward journey demanded the unrelenting scrutiny of an examined life to wrestle with the limitations of childhood and culture and an extroverted world interested only in success and money, not meaning and purpose.
In Confessions of an Introvert Bond writes a compelling and compassionate memoir of the ups and downs of everyday life as seen by a Jungian psychoanalyst who committed his life to the quest for knowledge about personality development in order to understand the mystery of his own near-death experience. Tracing the steps of each stage of personality development through which every life must pass from childhood to maturity, Bond reflects on thirty-five years of experience in Jungian psychology to tell the story of radical self-acceptance and individuation.
Confessions of an Introvert is a Jungian memoir crafted as an intimately personal narrative of inner discovery where dreams and near-death experience create a personal myth of meaning, using everyday language to explore important concepts which influence our true inner lives:
What is the family myth and how does it shape our lives?
The importance of discovering our aptitudes and developing them to full potential
Fulfilling the demands of the first half of life, the midlife crisis, and discovering the goals of the second half of life
Finding our life's work, and feeling the commitment to personal legacy
What it means to become an individual against all the pressures to conform
The joy of being an introvert and the power of the inner life to shape our world
The meaning of dreams as a dialog with the inner self
Major concepts of C. G. Jung in everyday language - shadow, persona, Self, opus, archetype, individuation
A unique perspective on the meaning of near-death experience
The Author
D. Stephenson Bond is a practicing psychoanalyst who has lectured widely on the topics of myth and creativity. He is the author of six books, including the novels Healing Lily (2010) and My Stranger (2012), and nonfiction including his new memoir Confessions of an Introvert (2018), Living Myth: Personal Meaning As a Way of Life (Shambhala) and The Archetype of Renewal (Inner City). He graduated with an M.Div. from Vanderbilt in 1981 and from the C. G. Jung Institute Boston in 1997. Meet D. Stephenson Bond.
Confessions of an Introvert Excerpts:
- Opening Paragraph: "When I was four years old I saw an amazing thing from my bedroom
window. I found the phenomenon inexplicable. Almost every
Friday night a glowing light appeared in the field behind our
house. Standing on my bed I could see the mysterious glow. It
flared against the night to reveal a multitude of people. Now and
then I could hear beautiful music, and sometimes the roar of the
crowd would raise me from the bed. I could not understand it.
After several such occurrences, I decided to see this thing for
myself. The allure, I realize now, had the nature of a compulsion." (page 7)
- On the aftermath of a Near-death Experience: "So the NDE was not the most remarkable thing. What
happened that night was without a doubt the crucial experience
of my life, never to be repeated. And yet, to my great surprise, in
the years and decades which followed the aftermath of the NDE
has come to define me more than the original experience. The
NDE was simply the question, and my life became the answer. I
want to say the NDE was my great white whale, crashing into my
life so long ago, but my story became the grim, stubborn
determination, verging on obsession, to sail the seven seas in
relentless pursuit of this great, large thing I had once
encountered. Ahab-like, I was wounded by it in some deep
psychic way, so much so that I could never let it go. And we all
know how things turned out for Ahab in the end." (page 12)
- On the analytic method: "The analytic method works to create an emotional clear
space. With time and trust you find yourself saying things you
have never said, sharing experiences which have never been
shared, asking questions about your life which have never been
asked. All of this was there in the inner life but never really had
the time to be taken seriously. Beyond simply the deeply
confessional catharsis, something else emerges. In dreams and
fantasies a dialog opens with a more knowing part of yourself. It
seems amazing, and yet it is no more amazing than the idea that
in the same way your body knows how to heal itself, your psyche
also knows how to heal itself. Your inner life will tell you when
you need to get out of your own way. It will tell you about the
mistakes you have made which caused injury. It will depict in
symbolic form the goal of the healing process. And your psyche
will do this with the full force of your emotional life which can
melt every paltry little intellectual wall you have built (without
quite knowing it) to protect yourself from yourself. The analyst
does not do this. Your inner life will do this. All the analyst needs
to do is to foster and honor the process through the vehicle of the
relationship of two people sitting face to face." (page 24)
- On individuation: "Individuation is the agenda of the second half of life. The
work requires a sorting out of the flotsam and jetsam of
fragmented experience through the years. In the end, it is
possible to distill a meaning, to see your life as a statement of
some undefinable process of which you yourself are the
product. With patience and careful attention the work
creates something which endures." (page 265)
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