Curt Thompson - The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
ivpress.com

2021 by Curt Thompson

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While any stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

The publisher cannot verify the accuracy or functionality of website URLs used in this book beyond the date of publication.

Interior art: JohnIn the Beginning: copyright 2010 Makoto Fujimura
Golden Sea: copyright 2011 Makoto Fujimura
CharisKairos (The Tears of Christ): copyright 2010 Makoto Fujimura
New Wine: copyright 2018 Makoto Fujimura

Cover design and image composite: David Fassett
Images: organic watercolor doodle: beastfromeast / Digital Vision Vectors / Getty Images
orange textured background: enjoyz / iStock / Getty Images Plus
yellow abstract: Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Moment / Getty Images
white paper texture: Katsumi Murouchi / Moment / Getty Images
SEM neurons cells: koto_feja / iStock / Getty Images Plus
blue abstract: Nath Chokh Perm Thnaraks / EyeEm / Getty Images
colorful leaves watercolor: Yifei Fang / Moment / Getty Images

ISBN 978-1-5140-0211-7 (digital)

ISBN 978-1-5140-0210-0 (print)

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

For

RICH AND JANELLE BUTTERWORTH,

BYRON AND KRISTIN LIST,

and

NEAL AND KENDRICK SMITH

Who, individually and

communally,

have created the beauty and goodness and truth

in which, over the last

three decades,

it has been my joy

to dwell,

to gaze,

and

to inquire of the Lord.

GOOD LITERATURE, DR. CURT THOMPSON WRITES, like all meaningful art, helps us access the beauty of what it means to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of our lives.

In The Soul of Desire Curt directs and redirects us, as a good therapist always does, to help us understand how to live a life defined by the psalmists longing to dwell in the house of the LORD... to gaze on the beauty of the LORD. But such journeys have to start first by recognizing the underlying misalignment of our assumptions, the false prejudgments we make of ourselves and others, and how we are often unable to name our own desires and articulate them clearly. This intimate journey of hope, complex and daunting as it may be, has specific names in this booknames such as Aaron, Carmen and Graham, Tara, Hudson, and Charlotte. Curt tells us their precious and sacred stories. This is a journey toward a community of authentic hope, healing, and tears.

Psychotherapy provides a setting in which shame is deconstructed through and in the presence of a properly boundaried, empathic relationship, and in which movement toward secure attachment is initiated and sustained, Curt writes.

Curts other important work The Soul of Shame has been a guide book for my own healing over the years. Curt is an expert guide into the dark and cold caves of shame. When I was going through a severe dark night of the soul several years back, a dear friend (also a therapist and an author) told me that my cave of shame was off limits. He simply forbade me to go there. It was Curts work that helped me to see the anatomy of my own shame and massage the shame toxins out of my system in order to stay out of such disastrous darkness.

It was then that I also began to fully understand Kintsugi, a craft tradition of Japanese refinement that I was introduced to earlier in my life as a national scholar at Tokyo University of Art in Nihonga. Kintsugi, a venerable Japanese tradition of mending broken pottery with lacquer and powdered gold, is a path toward seeing the fractures and fragments as something to be highlighted (with gold), thereby making the resulting mended object more valuable than the originalas valuable as the original may have been before it was broken. As we gaze upon the broken body and beauty of Christ, Curt notes, we are in intimate contact with [Jesuss] wounds. The post-resurrection body of Christ still bears the nail marks, and by his wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:5).

What is remarkable is that the wounds of Christ represent Jesus decision to stay human after the resurrection: God chooses to keep the wounds and therefore be fully humanfully alive in his wounds after the full suffering as a human. For Curt, this reality of the new creation is amply evident in his journey as a psychiatrist. He then helps us to journey into our shame and pain, only to have the Master Kintsugi Artist, the Creator God, mend to make us new.

This book in itself is a work of art to behold, to gaze upon, to commune with. This is a manual on how a community may become a Kintsugi community for generations to come.