Journey in Depth

It's not often that the genesis of a book deserves a mention. This one does. Its contents were never meant to be written down with a view to publication. What appears here in fifteen chapters started life in the ancient oral tradition of the spoken word, incidentally and casually recorded on audiotape. These talks were given - mostly by Barbara Somers between 1980 and 1983 - to trainee counsellors and psychotherapists at the London Centre for Transpersonal Psychology, which she had founded with the late Ian Gordon-Brown in 1973. The training course itself was Barbara's creation, and she and Ian ran it from 1978 until his death in 1996. He contributed two talks of his own and two more in tandem with Barbara. The material, captured on 91 tapes, rested for fourteen years in a shopping bag on wheels until 1997, when Hazel Marshall began her labour of love of transcribing and editing them.

The result is a remarkable introduction to the specific British school of Transpersonal psychology, established by the authors when the very concept was new and unfamiliar in this country. Its ancestry embraces the work of Jung, Maslow and Assagioli, and the insights of the Western alchemical and Eastern mystical tradition. As the "fourth force" in modern psychology, following on classical psychoanalysis, behaviourism and humanistic psychology, it invokes the spiritual dimension, the Self which represents the wise, timeless and perennial essence of the human being, and anchors it firmly into everyday life. As the Zen saying has it, "Before enlightenment carry water, chop wood; after enlightenment carry water, chop wood".

What makes this book unique is its highly individual atmosphere that draws in and captivates the reader who needn't be a counsellor or therapist to benefit from it. After all, it deals with the highest and deepest human experiences and is an excellent guidebook for the inner journey of developing one's full potential. But it wears its wisdom lightly. Barbara Somers covers all the major subjects of life, from early development through the ramifications of family life - parents, siblings, the child that survives in the adult - and on to the power of archetypes, the meaning of illness, dreamwork and, finally, "the hero's journey". She has a terrific sense of humour and a taste for the absurd; her approach is gentle, caring and respectful towards her clients, and cheerfully irreverent towards therapeutic modalities which she considers outdated and ossified. Her case histories are perfect cameos. And she has a special way of getting her clients to use imagery in the course of a session, allowing sudden spontaneous images to emerge which convey more meaning, much faster, than what words can express. Typically she comments, "I follow the person's images, working from where they take me, not where I think they ought to go".

She sees the therapist's role as facilitator and companion on the client's inner journey and warns her trainees, "If we ever think we have the answer for another human being, we'd better pack it up and go and do something different". In many of her talks the Transpersonal is not even mentioned, but it shines through as a presence, a vertical dimension. Only in the latter chapters does the focus shift to such fundamentals as the meaning and purpose of existence, and of life as "an adventure of choice instead of a series of problems". In the final chapter, which is about choices, Barbara Somers neatly stands the story of the Fall on its head: from the psychological point of view, man and woman were created to make choices, hence they had to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Serpent must have been put in the Garden by God Himself, otherwise it wouldn't be there. The Serpent, she adds, "is the life-force itself that drives and pushes us on, forcing us to develop." Hardly the stuff to delight churchmen, but, like the rest of this extraordinary book, deeply relevant to us here and now.