Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other - Jungian Perspective on Relationship

Excellent book, both for professionals and large public. James Hollis seldom disappoints. It is one book that I recommend reading to my clients regularly.

Hollis guides us through the projections we put onto the Other believing it will fulfill us, save us, makes us whole, happy and fill us with meaning. This isn't and shouldn't be the case, we're responsible for our own meaning, and that meaning is to be shared with the Other, not taken from it.

I have read this book a number of times and glean new wisdom every time. It explained every mystery of human relationship that has baffled me for 50 years. The insight I gained helps me understand other people as well as myself in both personal and professional relationships. Hollis can synthesize Jung better than any author or teacher working today, and uses literature and poetry which greatly enriches his writing. All of James Hollis books are exemplarary and I recommend them all. I have been fortunate enough to hear Hollis speak and he is even better in real life. Extremely wise and empathetic. I have also given this book as a gift to many of my friends and colleagues. I find the previous review very interesting and reveals more to me about the author of the review than this book!!

I'm a bookie. I write books, but I also read: thousands of them. I say this to put in context what I'm about to say: I'd put this book into my Top 20. What's more, I bore everyone I have the opportunity to harangue with the fact that this is one of the most important books out there, I believe; and if I had a say in it it would be required reading in all secondary schools everywhere. We might then learn not to burden our Beloved with the utterly impossible task of carrying our soul for us – and making us happy. Then perhaps we might find ourselves free to actually love them. I have read and reread this book so many times (and there are now so many pencilled marks in the margins), that I can quote large chunks by heart - and that's from someone whose memory for word-recall is not good. A particular q that Hollis raises stay with me: 'What am I asking from this other that I should be doing for myself?' (and its corollary: 'What am I doing for this other that s/he should be doing for him/herself?'). Those are apparently simple and direct questions, but the reclaiming of self-responsibility makes a big difference in relationship; in it is a reclaiming too of unfair and unreal expectations and demands, and the resultant blaming and complaints when the other 'fails to make me happy'. I can't praise this book highly enough if you would like to improve your self-knowledge and your intimate relationship/s. Hollis is humane, human, kind, generous and very good at communicating; the snippets of poetry throughout really added to the text, as well.

This book made me a devotee of James Hollis. The romantic notions of "soul mates" is put to rest -- but with great insight and compassion. We are born alone and die alone and can hope for some soulful connections in the interim but no one, however beloved, can spare us from walking our own path to individuation. Hollis writes gently but sagely about our attempts to defy this law of nature.