Dr. Joanna LaPrade - Forged in Darkness

This edition first published in the UK and USA in 2022 by

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Joanna LaPrades Forged in Darkness provides an archetypal frame for approaching, sometimes even understanding, the descent that sooner or later we all experience during dark times. When these times come, as they will, her structure suggests a way of understanding, a mode of approach to finding ones meaning task in hours when the ego has been dethroned, and ordinary consciousness rendered powerless.

James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and bestselling author

Joanna LaPrades fine book reveals the underworld not as a mythic abstraction, but as the living reality of meaningful darkness and transformative suffering that we must all face, one way or another. She skilfully combines psychological insight and a nuanced imagination for mythic patterns with a deep feeling for human suffering and the capacity to write with an immediacy that stirs and educates.

Keiron Le Grice, Ph.D., author of The Rebirth of the Hero and The Archetypal Cosmos

As an integrative oncologist, I know that one of the biggest challenges for a patient is facing themselves. Dr LaPrade expertly guides folks to understand the story of their own lives and to re-establish connection, step out of damaging polarities, and engage in truly living versus being paralyzed by the fear of dying. I will return again and again to these pages and her wisdom, to help shine light on my own darkness and encourage others to do the same.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, Co-author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer and Mistletoe and theEmerging Future of Integrative Oncology

facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est

Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 1269

easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this is the toil!

H. R. Fairclough (trans.)

To Ben,
for staying with us.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Entering the Underworld

I remember well the long, black corridor, the distant archway, and the shrouded figures sitting like sentinels on countless tiers. Each figures face was hidden behind a gray fabric that fluttered in an unseen wind. Over and over, I awoke from this dream knowing intuitively it was a pathway to some kind of depth. My interest in the underworld began then.

Ive never really been drawn to the surface of things. Ive always pried, dug, and explored the deeper and darker layers. The thread that connects my curiosities and passions is my fascination with the inner world, particularly those places within us that are painful, confusing, yet intriguing places I have come to see as my own underworld. Above all, I am enlivened by stories of peoples lives and histories, of the human imagination and the myths we tell to explain ourselves and our place in the world. I became a depth psychologist because I wanted to engage with myself and others in complex, creative, and meaningful ways, to look beneath the surface and see and feel what is actually going on in the psyche.

In my early twenties, I was in a public library when I randomly, it seems, took a copy of On Jung by Anthony Stevens off the shelf. I drained the book in a day, and in my journal I scribbled a simple question: Do I find what I seek in these pages? I wasnt certain, but I found the subject of Stevenss book and the question so compelling it resonated in me so deeply that I made a leap of faith and enrolled in Pacifica Graduate Institute to get my PhD in depth psychology the study of the psyche through the psychologies of C. G. Jung and James Hillman.

At Pacifica, I found a world brimming with subjects I loved mythology, dreams, history, religion, theory and deep self-exploration. I learned from inspiring professors such as Safron Rossi and Keiron Le Grice, and, looking back, I see that depth psychology was the only path I could have taken. Im now in private practice as a psychotherapist and writing about the underworld journey once again walking down that long, black corridor into the depths.

Forged in Darkness is based on my PhD dissertation, Descent and Ascent: Archetypal Styles of Consciousness in Underworld Journeys. I hope some of the tools, thoughts, and images offered in these pages might help you let the underworld move you toward a wholeness and clarity of being that simply cannot be found in daylight.

What is the Underworld?

In this book, I weave together myth, religion, history, depth psychology, cases from my practice, personal stories from colleagues, friends, family, famous people and world events, and my own inner journey to guide you and me toward a remembering of and return to the innermost richness of our own underworlds.

The underworld is the place of the unknown the darkness, the hidden, the dead, monsters and demons, gnarly trees and cold fissures that wind deep into the earth. Its the place where we keep the discarded parts of ourselves, those aspects of who we are that our parents, educators, society, and selves deemed unfit and unsuitable.

There is no more challenging threshold to cross than that between the dayworld and underworld, between the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves. Humans have handed down stories of the underworld for centuries its purpose and how to get there. Whether traveling into caverns of the earth or the depths of ourselves, the underworld journey is an experience of mourning, sacrifice, unwanted and difficult experiences, danger, estrangement from the past, uncertainty, and dissolution of who we once were.

Darkness is where we go to recover forgotten treasures, and to get there we may have to cross unfathomably deep rivers, battle hostile forces, and face the judgments of the gods. In the gloom, we behold things we wish wed never seen, horrors and challenges well never forget. Perhaps our voice turns into screams, our chest seizes, blood freezes, footsteps falter, and in the place where the lights go out the world stops. When were in the submerged depths of the human mind, it can be difficult to even remember the surface.