[…] Much has been written in psychology about interpersonal conflicts and how to resolve them. Many authors of popular psychology books and most therapy centers offer advice on how to save the marriage, improve communications, enhance self-esteem, and achieve love and success. I am investigating the opposite: the element in the psyche that wants to destroy relationships, to leave, to die, to go down and stay low for as long as it takes for the old identity to die. This turning inward and downward comes from an unconscious sense that if the exhausted old "me" does not die, my body will carry the death wish in a literal and terminal fashion. What the psyche refuses to acknowledge, the body always manifests. Whenever the body says "no more", it is sending a message that should get our attention.

[…] I failed to understand a sequence of dreams that suggested: you think you want a way out of the labyrinth? Wrong! Look for the entrance. A series of psychological disasters and a nearly fatal accident popped my shiny California bubble. Tumbling, literally, into an empty pool and sustaining a cerebral hemorrhage was just the right dose of death for equilibrium to return.

[…] I am a frequent traveler and have visited many countries; however, of all the trips I’ve taken in my life, the one that was the most fascinating was my descent to the dark recesses of my psyche, that place where we reside as if in a nightmare, a place that the ancient Greeks called the Underworld and that we call the unconscious. Watching the process of my own self-destruction was captivating, like watching a cobra poised to strike. When the unconscious opens, it disturbs every routine and life takes on a surprising quality. Madam Death insists that surrender be absolute.

[…]I began investigating what exactly had changed for me, theoretically as well as personally. I revisited everything I thought I knew about psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, about matters of the heart, about growing up and being an adult, about human nature, and human love. […] This is why this book speaks with two voices. One is that of the therapist writing a critique of my field, observing the evolution of my trade from a theoretical point of view.

[…] The other voice is not so detached. It is the much less assured voice of an ordinary person telling an ordinary experience of inferiority, brokenness, failure and pain. It comes from a need to test all the theories against my own experience of suffering–a very different posture than the lofty position of professor and therapist. It is a phenomenological stance and as such it excludes the clinical interpretive terminology, moving away from the medical model, away from psychodynamics, and towards literature.

[…] To sustain life, the psyche requires pleasure, joy, and a fascination with the world. This seems impossible in the face of acute pain. Yet, I believe the paradox can be sustained, if one is ready to go through the suffering bearing the curiosity and respect of a pilgrim traveling in the Underworld. I believe the next evolution of psychology will be concerned less with pathology–leaving it to neuroscience–and will become more like a philosophical training, capable of preparing the person for the voyage in the country of pain and joy–depth psychology as the art of not wasting the joy of life. The necessity of a descent into the Underworld is a core idea of depth psychology, one that I wish to explore anew in this book.