Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore (Piatkus, 2004)
This is a book I have returned to many times. It is also a book I have had to replace many times because I keep giving it to somebody who I think might need it (a habit inherited from my mother).
Moore provides ‘A guide to finding your way through life’s ordeals’, which is refreshing and thought-provoking. He comes from a background as a Catholic monk, followed by training as a psychotherapist, and he brings the influences of psychology and theology to his work.
I am a medically trained psychotherapist, and I often feel disillusioned by the medicalisation of life’s difficulties in our culture. The balance between illness of the body and illness of the soul is hard to define and I find Moore gives me some alternative ways of thinking. This book does not deny the existence of illnesses such as depression and anxiety, but it raises the possibility that these are life experiences which contain meaning and need to be thought about in order to find the way through. He provides a framework for that thinking process which would be acceptable to people of all faiths, and of no faith. I imagine it is not everybody’s cup of tea, but it made so much sense to me that I am unable to find anything I would have liked changed.
To begin with he introduces the idea of the Dark Night, with some lines from Dante’s Inferno:
‘In the middle of our life journey I found myself in a dark wood. I had wandered from the straight path. It isn’t easy to talk about it: it was such a thick, wild, and rough forest that when I think of it my fear returns… I can’t offer any good explanation for how I entered it. I was so sleepy at that point that I strayed from the right path.’
We thus begin the journey of reflection which takes us through disturbances including physical and psychological illness, falling in love, relationship breakdown, loss of meaning and facing the shadow (in Jungian psychology this is the aspect of ourselves which we deny or wish did not exist). Moore’s writing is at once prosaic and beautiful. It is easy to understand at some levels and a cursory read would be worthwhile, however it is best appreciated by reading and re-reading in small sections (with a notebook at hand) in order fully to appreciate and think about what he is saying.
As he says, ‘To deal with these disturbances we need rich, solid, and useful ideas, rare items in a world of facts and opinions. I get my confidence as a therapist from my studies in religion, mythology, the arts, and depth psychology’.
Indeed, he brings ideas to life through experience, thought and writing from people as diverse as the figures of Greek and Roman mythology and characters from religious texts and teachings; Dickens, Freud and Bonhoeffer; Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson. He encourages us to notice and learn from the mythology around us, in film and television, in novels and paintings, and in the daily events of our culture.
I highly recommend this book to anybody who has now or has had ‘disturbances’ in their life of one sort or another, and for those on the journey with troubled others. Reading it facilitated a number of changes in my own thinking, and it made intuitive sense. In fact it was for me an ‘Aha’ moment, as though I had found something I needed. I discovered Thomas Moore had put into words so many things I had sensed but not been able to articulate.