Ghosts and Secrets

GHOSTS AND SECRETS

Steven Prasinos

To be published in THE FOURTH R, 2025

I first became interested in ghosts, psychologically, when I noticed over the years how some of my psychotherapy patients felt “ghost like.” It seemed these patients were buried within themselves, often because of secret trauma. They had learned from a young age to repress and pretend, to only say and be what others wanted. And all they were not saying had been emerging as symptoms. Such persons were typically depressed and lacking in authenticity. They endured a kind of social invisibility, a suffocating loneliness. Buried alive, if you will.

Increasingly I came to appreciate the suffering of feeling ghostly. Social invisibility is a prime cause of neurosis, violence, and suicidality.[1]We might call this condition “disassociation” or “depersonalization” but only when, in my practice, we named and personified this alienated aspectas “ghost” did the patient seem, ironically, to come alive. By personifying, effectively re-vitalizing, the buried aspect an awakening and visibility became possible.

This idea of being psychologically haunted gradually evolved into my wondering how we are all, to varying degrees, haunted by what’s buried within. Thus I came to study ghostliness as an existential dimension.

Belief in Ghosts

Regardless of whether or not the deceased actually appear to the living, many have noted how the ghost figure is deeply embedded in human imagination. From primitive to contemporary cultures, across history, be it in myth, religion, literature, or film, belief in ghosts and ghost stories are nearly always present.[2] Ghost belief [3]is found, for example, among ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Aztecs, indigenous tribes, and among nearly half of surveyed modern Americans.[4]

Even in our everyday language we can see the examples of the ghost concept: ghost town, ghost writer, ghost of a smile, ghost of a chance, ghosting.[5]The ghost character is clearly an abiding feature in human story making. Akin to Hero, Sage, Mother and Lover. In other words, the ghost idea is an archetype.

I am not here taking a position on the authenticity of at least some ghost experiences. Many witnesses seem credible and sincere. But here we will examine the ghost story psychologically. We will see what its prevalence and power might teach us about ourselves.

The Ghost Narrative

A mysterious baby wailing in the night, a translucent woman in Elizabethan clothes, an unknown child wandering a hall, a staring youth appearing and then vanishing. These are all classic ghost figures.[6]Such figures, and the stories about them, often give us a chill. That chill is our emotional response to a perceived slippage between the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the unreal.[7] This chill animates countless ghost stories.

The plots of these stories have commonalties. Generally the ghost is aggrieved.[8] This may be because the ghost, when alive, was murdered,[9]assaulted,[10]betrayed,[11]or died too soon.[12] Ghosts were often victims of trauma.

Similarly, in typical ghost stores of the Japanese,[13]Hindus,[14]and Babylonians,[15]ghosts are angry about being improperly buried or insufficiently honored. In Catholicism, an unbaptized baby can become a ghost.[16]Again, such ghosts are victims, but of neglect.

So ghost stories typically feature some form of injustice. Or, more specifically, the ghost story is a tale of unrecognized injustice. The murderer has not been held to account, the abuse was hidden, the deceit unpunished, the death not honored, the baby not christened. Ghosts, then, are earthbound spirits who, because of injustice, cannot move on.[17]An anguish seeks acknowledgement.
Thus ghost stories expose secrets, the rising of something buried. In Samuel Kimbles’ words, “Phantoms are born of secrets.”[18]

Ghost Qualities

Ghosts generally have certain qualities. They typically haunt at night.[19]Their behavior, across incidents, is often repetitive.[20]They, for example, may wander the same hall, utter the same wails, wear the same clothes. They often appear angry, miserable, or depressed. And ghosts can’t do much more than appear, frighten, and, perhaps, speak.[21]They seem frozen in time, caught in a compulsive loop, alone in the dark and helpless.

But ghosts are not ineffectual. Whether they appear in an encounter or a story, ghosts figures have a weird power over us. They have disturbing back-stories. They fracture our sense of reality. They evoke, as mentioned, a chill.

Thus, the primary power of the ghost is psychological. They are a frightening “affective presence.”[22] Ghosts have the power to disturb.

Ghosts as Psychological

There is much evidence suggesting that most encounters with ghosts are psychogenic (internally engendered) rather than objective (publicly verified). Despite innumerable attempts, for example, no clear proof of ghosts has ever been found.[23] And it is rare for an entire group to witness a ghost. Further, most investigated mediums (people who profess to communicate with the dead) have been found to be fraudulent.[24]And several researchers have found that psychotherapy for ghost witnesses tends to reveal repressed issues that, once addressed, remove the ghost experience.[25]

Further supporting this idea that ghosts are psychological is research finding that, statistically, one is more likely to see a ghost while half asleep, recently bereaved, suffering from brain damage, or taking drugs.[26] That is, in states where the separation between fantasy and objective reality is already blurred.

Also, the look of ghosts varies with time and culture.[27]In ancient Greece and Rome ghosts were wraith-like and winged, in medieval times they were reanimated corpses or holy apparitions,[28]and in contemporary imagination they tend to be translucent.[29]

Ghost origin stories shift across cultures as well, depending on how a culture views burial, incest, baptism, homicide, and so on. All this suggests ghost stories derive more from collective imagination than from actual sightings.

Then too there are old questions about why ghosts appear clothed.[30] Rather than the clothes surviving death, isn’t it more likely that these figures are psychological, being projected as imagined?

Finally, there are interesting experiments demonstrating that the mere suggestion that a location is haunted is enough to elicit ghost perceptions.[31] Believing is seeing.

All this is not to say that we can explain away all ghost experiences and put them in a neat psychological box. Nor are we saying all those who have seen a ghost are suffering from a repression. We are leaving room for the mysterious and the paranormal. But, given all the above, it seems reasonable to view most ghost experiences as originating from imagination, not objective reality.

Besides, here we are interested in the ghost figure as archetype, as an abiding “thought form”[32]in human imagination. There is clearly, throughout human history, an ongoing imagining of visits from the dead.

Ghosts as Projections

So we have here identified a fascinating phenomenon: under the right conditions, repressed aspects of the self can trigger perceptual events. Ghost experiences reveal a psychological sequence moving from repression to projection to perception. It seems the ghost, rising up from the dead, is the repressed made visible.

To be clear, by projection I mean ascribing qualities to an external object that are in fact one’s own qualities. But projection is unconscious. We project what we are not accepting or even aware of in ourselves. Projections are, paradoxically, the presence of an Absence.[33]Ghosts are visitors that can thus upset the very structure of our identity. And that can be deeply frightening.

So in ghost stories and ghost encounters, we are projecting onto an old empty house, a graveyard, a dark room, and so on. And what might this projecting show us?

First, this unconscious projecting reveals that what’s been buried within ourselves is not dead. If important enough, what we have banished as “not me” returns as ghost. Ghosts can be projections of our own buried suffering, of injustices unreconciled. Unwanted self-aspects that are externalized, or what Carl Jung called “autonomous complexes.”[34]

Thus we cannot kill anything within us, especially not our trauma. We are haunted by our damage. The hand bursts out of the grave.

Second, our projecting reveals how disturbed we can be, deep down, by the trauma of others. The ghost reminds us of a murder, a betrayal, a rape, an abandonment. Consciously we may cultivate a detached indifference, but the ghost reminds us that the pain of others matters to us. The ghost, then, can be our buried compassion for victims.

Third, ghost stories can be projections of a terrifying version of death. In the ghost story death is a state where we die and become a bereft soul wandering in limbo, untouchable and trapped in time. Thus, we may be projecting upon the ghost story an existential terror.

Importantly, though, ghost stories are powerful not only because we project our fear of becoming a ghost, but also, more deeply, our fear of how we feel ghostly now. This is the existential condition, described above, I noticed in many of my traumatized patients. The sense of living invisibly, stranded, buried alive with ones secrets. This “self alienation” may be a condition so common it becomes hard to see.[35]

Fourth, if ghosts are projections, then in certain scenarios we are projecting what we disapprove of within us. When haunted by a ghost who is a murderer, rapist, or betrayer we are projecting what is most base within us. Or, when haunted by the improperly grieved we may be projecting our guilt about not having sufficiently appreciated someone, now gone, forever.

Finally, though less common, there are stories of good, kindly ghosts who comfort and advise. Such stories might initially seem anomalous but they, too, can be understood as projections. These ghosts can be the fantasized fulfillment of a projected wish for the return of the departed and for reassurance that they still, in some fashion, live on. The wish that death is not the frozen limbo of our fears. Also we can see in the good ghost the projection of our own inner wisdom, mercy, and love. As Catherine Belsey put it, “The dead return because we want them back.”[36]

Secrecy as Socially Determined

A key feature of most ghost stories is secrecy; the ghost represents the surfacing of an unwanted or unknown self-aspect. Often the secret, as mentioned above, is an unrecognized injustice. And secrecy is socially determined.[37] We keep secrets from others, for instance, to protect reputations, to enable continued wrongdoing, to evade punishment, to preserve a family, to mask vulnerability. In each case the secret appears socially motivated. The secret preserves a social status quo, a persona. To belong to a culture, a fundamental need, we must keep its secrets.

We keep secrets from ourselves for similar reasons: To avoid self-punishment, to contain rage or anguish, to believe we are good. Mostly we keep secrets from ourselves to maintain a particular self-image. Again, the secret preserves a social status quo, sick as that can be.

So ghosts are manifestations of secrets. If society tolerated impulses (not actions) towards incest, murder, rape, deceit, or abandonment, then these would not be hidden and there would be no ghosts. But, as Freud emphasized, culture requires the suppression of certain impulses .[38]In other words, we are all to some degree haunted by what we do not accept, what we bury. And what is and is not acceptable, what may be exposed and what must be entombed, is socially determined.

What we cover within ourselves, as we conform to culture, renders those aspects invisible both to others and ourselves. This is how a culture can “generate invisibility”[39]and “support ghostliness” in its members.[40] And, because we cannot know ourselves except via sharing with another,[41]this is how cultures, to varying degrees, collude in promoting loneliness.

It might be inferred that the healthier we are the more visible we are but this is not so. Schopenhauer depicted human beings as porcupines who long for the warmth of others but fear getting pricked[42]. No one is completely trustworthy. We need our boundaries and privacy. Emotional well being, then, requires balancing visibility and safety.[43]This puzzle of how visible to be is an existential question that faces us all. Too much visibility, as in unfiltered psychosis, is chaotic and socially scorned. Too little and we become the ghost in the hallway.

So we each house ideas and desires beyond the bounds of culture. We contain the too intense, the unacceptable, the taboo. These are our socially determined ghosts. But when social strictures weaken, when the dead slip in among the living, our sense of reality, our very identity, is upended. Ghosts show us we are so much more than a single, well-defined personality. Ghosts, at their most powerful, can threaten not only our identity but our very sanity. That is why they can terrify.

What do Ghosts Want?

Despite their disturbing nature, ghost stories have intrigued us for millennia. Perhaps because they represent the return of something lost, be it a lost part of oneself or lost justice. Ghosts have sufficient psychic energy to emerge from our unconscious soup and make themselves felt. The ghost has the power, as noted above, to disturb us and even, if it has sufficient valence, produce a perceptual event. This power is what makes ghosts matter. Ghosts are important because they appear and appear because they are important.

And what do our ghosts want? The answer is simple. Just as with insistent, recurring dream figures, ghosts wants attention.[44]More specifically, ghosts want attention to injustice.[45]The ghost is effectively saying:

I seek resurrection. I suffer in the twilight zone between conscious and unconscious. I am lost in the dark, seeking light. Extend your compassion to me! My story matters! My suffering is also your suffering! Awaken your morality! Feel the pain of my murder, my rape, my betrayal, my neglect! It is wrong to bury something alive!

Thus there is something in us, and within the collective, that will not let us rest with our injustice and neglect. Inside us resides a morality inherited from our collective psychology as herd creatures.[46] Ghosts can be seen as manifestations of conscience. The ghost undermines our neglect and insists,“You shall ignore me no longer!”

In Jungian terms we could say that the ghost story is the unconscious providing the personality with an opportunity for reconciliation, an opportunity to open a door and welcome an outcast home.

To welcome the outcast, psychologically, is to shift away from secrecy towards revelation. And, since secrets are socially determined, exposing them can be counter-cultural, disruptive, and even, as Avery Gordon brilliantly explains, revolutionary.[47]

Cultural Ghosts

What then are our cultural ghosts? What self-aspects are we taught to bury? What, collectively, haunts us?

Some answers can be found by considering what social judgments I might most fear. What public perceptions would most shame me? And the answers become a list of deviances. To name a few: Sadist, Pedophile, Narcissist, Racist, Sexist, Coward, Stupid, Crazy.

And this list is only what comes to my particular awareness. Who knows what I will not allow myself to even consider as a possible aspect?

There are two key points here. First, each of us is a multiplicity. None of us is one, static personality. The psyche, as Carl Jung says, is not an “indivisible unity.”[48] To quote Euripides, we “contain multitudes.” In each of us there is all of us.

As Jung emphasized, to have immoral or ugly aspects (shadow aspects) is true of us all.[49]We all contain good and evil, light and dark. To mature, as individuals or as a culture, is to become less simple-minded and innocent. We overcome the naive idea that I am simply “good.” In this way we become more inclusive of the full range of personhood in self and others. This is why it is important for our culture to evolve in its acceptance of personal complexity and paradox.

The dominant cultural idea that each of us is but one personality suffocates our inner diversity and, as James Hillman beautifully explains, fosters loneliness.[50] Another way to put it is that there is a kind of colonizing[51]of both culture and psyche by a rejecting ego. This psychic tyranny[52]promotes the projecting of unwanted aspects onto others. Thus we are more likely to “other,” demonize,[53]and even abuse.

Characters in popular art have power because they manifest aspects of our inner multiplicity. We laugh at Buster Keaton as we see our clumsiness. We have a morbid fascination with Hannibal Lecter as we see our depravity. We adore Snow White as we relate to our innocent goodness. We are each part of all and all is part of each. Personal multiplicity is real.

The second key point is that acceptance is not approval. Though we can acknowledge our ghosts, including destructive aspects, this does not mean we must allow them to be expressed behaviorally. To acknowledge them (and even see their value) as members of the crew does not mean they captain the ship.

So if our secret deviances are our ghosts, and if we can accept, but not necessarily approve of, our deviances then we evolve personally and socially. We widen the scope of acceptance and love.

The way we know which ghosts require attention is by noticing what disturbs us. Nightmares, moods, compulsions, out-of-character behavior, persistent fantasies,and so on are all examples of haunting. A self-aspect is rising up from the dead and employing its psychological power to disturb. Symptoms herald ghosts.

Some ghosts may even be inherited. We may be disturbed, consciously or not, by the trauma or misdeeds of parents, grandparents and ancestors. We can even be haunted by collective traumas like slavery, the decimation of Native Americans and the Holocaust. Or, with certain persons we may feel strangely awkward, guilty,or repulsed. These are examples of a psychological haunting.

The same dynamic can apply on a societal level. Societal disturbances may indicate the presence of collective ghosts. Such collective disturbances include mass shootings, environmental collapse, endemic anxiety, genocide,and war. Each disturbance represents psychic impulses insisting on attention. Each is a ghost rising from the collective psyche.

There are, though, cultural forces wanting to maintain the status quo,including prevailing power structures. The rising of cultural ghosts threatens normative secrecy and can be profoundly disruptive. Note for example how those haunted by secret sexual abuse, once validated by the “Me-too” movement, have upended laws, families, and the Catholic church. This is an excellent example of the turbulence that ensues from cultural “un-secreting.”

Yet such transformations are invariably opposed by conservative forces that seek to keep us numb via alcohol, the titillation of sex and violence, fear mongering, etc. Love, which I suggest can be thought of as a “learning receptivity”, takes courage because it can be, when applied to the unwanted, seen as a threat.

Healing and Higher Self

Ghosts, (projected, disturbing sub-personalities), indicate breaches in the organization of a personality or culture. To be haunted is to be repeatedly visited by such troubling sub-personalities (recall Jung’s “autonomous complexes”[54]).

These sub-personalities are real, just as real as the dominant personality. Every personality, dominant or not, is an invisible, unique constellation of perspective, needs,and emotional tone.[55] If you don’t believe in ghosts, look in the mirror.

Because the ego, the organizer of personality, is disturbed by symptoms, it is motivated to make some sort of response to its ghosts. On an individual level, the ego may repress harder by increasing such defenses as drug use, compulsions, distractions,and self-hate. On a societal level the collective might repress deviance harder by stricter punishments and censorship. But such responses keep failing as they have been failing. Haunting doesn’t stop until the ghost is integrated and the personality made more whole.

To make the personality more whole the ego needs to expand its inclusivity. This entails a recalibration of what is acceptable. In other words, to integrate is to expand one’s tolerance for multiplicity and deviance. Again, this does not mean deviances need be approved of or acted out. Rather the ego expands and is willing to learn from its deviance.

On paper this may sound simple enough, but it is in fact agonizing work. Am I really willing to accept as part of me the presence of sub-personalities such as sadist, narcissist, racist, killer, pedophile, psychotic and so forth? How can I transcend my repulsion to such ugliness and shame?

I see only one way. The organizing ego must invoke a perspective thatis more inclusive than itself. The ego must counter the fear of the ghost with the presence of a love greater than its own. The ego must transcend its own boundaries. Ghosts demand growth.

To summon a love greater than one’s own is to summon yet another sub-personality. The sub-personality of ghost can be met by the presence of mercy, grace,and understanding. This sub-personality has been called one’s higher self, higher power, God, Holy Spirit, Christ,and so on. The essential point here is that it is beyond the personal point of view, or “transpersonal.”

Psychic problems require psychic solutions. When haunted, the ego faces a choice point between exclusion and inclusion, between repression and redemption, between hate and love. A manifestation of the ghost archetype can be healed by a manifestation of the higher self archetype. The higher self can meet the ghost with love (i.e., learning receptivity), transcend the ego’s biases, and become redeemer and savior.

So do we simply imagine an inner savior and then apply that presence to the ghost? Yes. By this imagining we are realizing an aspect of our potential.[56] The ghost, the projected unwanted aspect, is a problem of imagination, a problem of psychic life. The solution is also via imagination, leading to a psychic restructuring.

It is wrong to say imagination is not real. Our lives are imaginary. Roles, judgments, heroes, villains, laws, narratives are all imagined. Even our labels for objects like chair, car,and cat are concepts existing only in imagination. We live in a soup of imagined, and real, narratives and concepts. To be psychologically sophisticated is to, as James Hillman puts it, “see the fantasy in all reality and the basic reality of fantasy.”[57]

So I am suggesting that for persons and societies to evolve we must invoke a higher self that expands the ego’s limitations. The form this higher self may assume varies across individuals and cultures. When visited by a ghost, we may invoke the benevolence of a Buddha, Allah, the Madonna or Christ. Or our higher self might take the form of a loving grandmother or even beloved Fido. We can personify the higher self in all sorts of ways. The key is that we do personify it and in such a way that it can be involved in our lives. The form is not as important as the presence.

Without an overarching love (a Divine Father, for example) all the individual’s “psychic fragments,”[58]are a conflicted mess. But as one cultivates an alliance with a transpersonal acceptance, all the sub-personalities are unified in one inclusive home. As this inner unity grows we correspondingly perceive more unity outside ourselves.[59] Love brings comfort. Love unifies.

Religions, which present various visions of a higher self, offer adherents a foundational presence with which to guide their lives. They offer a North Star with which one can navigate life’s waters. They instruct what should be at the center of the personality. They guide us in navigating our moral failures, our inner ugliness, our ghosts.

Christ, a manifestation of the savior archetype, is particularly focused on inclusion. With his acceptance of sinners and his portrayal of God as a merciful, forgiving Father, Jesus, psychologically, represents a presence through which to meet our ghosts. He is the lover of outcasts. As Adyashanti, a Christian Buddhist, says, Jesus “wakes us up from the dream of separation and isolation.”[60] This is the deeper meaning of “love thy enemies.”[61]

Contemporary psychology could enhance its helpfulness if it were to legitimate more the concept of a higher self. Psychology can legitimate the idea that we all have access to inner wisdom if only we choose to imagine it and thus make it real. Imagination can actualize. We can consciously summon a loving presence which then alters our perception. We can unconsciously project ghosts or consciously project love. These ideas represent a crucial intersection between psychology and religion. The more we channel the unconditional love of a higher self the less we are haunted. From this point of view, a connection to ones higher self, whatever its form, is a cornerstone of mental health.

Examples

Let us now apply the higher self to some deviance. Let’s take a narcissistic person and meet them with a transpersonal love. To see the narcissist through the higher self’s eyes is to see the loneliness, the desperation, the frustration of being addicted to admiration. Again, the healing is in the accepting. The healing is in the seeing.

How about a person suffering with pedophilia? I see the agony of having one’s sexuality entangled with minors. I see this person as possessed with a weird compulsion to recover something in themselves even as it shatters their life and damages a child. I see the ghost within. Not as an objectified villain, but as a being. Not to solve but to see.[62]

So to negotiate a ghost we must be sensitive to presence. The palpable, visceral flow of sensation. The subtle, ever present stream of vibrations, if you will. To be conscious of this dynamic, flowing, inner stream is to be conscious, we might say, of the soul. The more we are attuned to the vibrations of our soul the more we are attuned to this invisible dimension in others.

And the more we see self and others through the compassionate eyes of our higher self the less ghosts there are. As we do this the existential apprehension that we are invisible beings trapped and alone in a body no longer agonizes us. We are spirits knowing spirits via channeling our higher self. What a paradox: we see one another when we know we are each invisible.

One of the difficulties in living this way, honoring the uniqueness of all, is that it becomes much harder to tolerate injustice. If we become more resonant with others then we are more resonant with their suffering. This can be overwhelming. Thus we need boundaries on our empathy.

On the other hand, of course, with more resonance comes more love, laughter,and warmth, more belonging, more resilience. We are more present to presence, more alive. And that is worth taking some social risks. Our symptoms and our callings will inform us where and when we need to focus.

Summary

We have been discussing the ghost as an archetypal thought form representing, psychologically, the arising of a repressed self-aspect. Ghosts can be seen as the projected manifestation of these buried (ego dystonic) fragments. This projecting affects self-image, relationships, and social trends. This projecting can also create moods, compulsions and, in extreme cases, the perceptual event of “seeing” a ghost.

What we repress/project tends to be the trauma of self or others, our immorality or our fears of a suffocating afterlife. We can also repress our mystical capacity for transcending the ego and connecting to transpersonal wisdom and love.

Societal prohibitions against what we can and cannot acknowledge are the main determinants of what we repress. The ghost, appearing via symptoms, dreams, social unrest etc., is a presence that disturbs. Such disturbances represent an opportunity for individuals and cultures to broaden their scope of love. This love involves acknowledging the psyche’s multiplicity and shadow aspects. Further, this love involves personifying, and animating, the disturbance into a living presence insisting on relationship.

To so evolve requires engaging a loving higher self that pulls the ego towards greater inclusivity. This higher self can take many forms and, though imagined, is real.

Conclusions

Because we all, to some degree, have secrets, including from ourselves, we all have ghosts. Though some protective secrecy is necessary, when we are, personally or culturally, “haunted” (disturbed by recurring symptoms), there is a call for integration. This integration is not achieved by objectifying the unwanted aspect as a disease to be eliminated. Rather,the unwanted aspect is a sub-personality, a living presence, demanding attention.

To personify this presence is not to pretend it is alive but rather to recognize it as alive. The ghost shifts from symptom (object) to being (subject). And once we have personified this self-aspect there is now relationship, something we can learn from[63] and love. It is much easier to love something alive.

To enter the realm of ghosts is frightening. They are the arising of something that has frightened us that we have therefore buried. To enter this realm activates our fear of insanity, of being overwhelmed by sub-personalities and going crazy. This in fact happens in psychosis, where the boundary between the ego and the unconscious is too permeable.

But there are some, like artists and shamans, who venture into the soul’s multiplicity, armed with an ego protected by a higher self. Thus protected such persons can organize their revelations and bring them back to the culture. These are our courageous ”truth warriors” who both frighten and lead us.

Everyone can, at their particular pace, be a hero and cultivate a psychological curiosity.[64] Just as ghosts are alive within us, so too is a higher self. Christ, Buddha, Satan, Santa Claus,and departed grandma are each, like the ghost, a presence. Each is an affective field with a particular perspective and tone.

Indeed, if we do not deaden and objectify reality, everyone and everything is a presence. A tree, a stranger, a painting. Each is a visit from a living presence.

We live in an imaginary world of meaning and narratives. We are constantly projecting and personifying. Rather than being haunted by the rejected we can choose what we project. We can choose to consciously project a Christ-like compassionate presence and alter our very perception. We can love all things psychological[65] and clear the lens through which we see the world. Thus we become less afraid.

In this way we contribute to shifts in the collective unconscious. We advance the well being of self and world. As each individual moves in this direction, society gradually, painfully, moves from repression and resistance to inclusion and peace. In order to so evolve the presence of grace seems necessary. To invoke a living, spiritual presence can unify our glorious diversity under one grand tent of love. As we awaken to this grand multiplicity of life we are less alone. By choosing to channel love, we can do something beautiful: we can redeem a ghost. We can transform the ghost from threat to teacher. Thus we can un-haunt. Yet more, we can be attuned to the holy presence of life itself.

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Matthew 25:35–36.

Notes
1. Jourard, S.M., The Transparent Self (D.Van Nostrand Co, 1971), p. 77.
2. Morton, L., Ghosts, A Haunted History (Reaktion Books, 2015), p. 8.
3. Clarke, R., Ghosts: A Natural History, 500 years of searching for Proof (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), p. 100.
4. Morton, p. 8.
5. Belsey, C., Tales of the Troubled Dead, Ghost Stories in Cultural History, (Edinburgh
University Press, 2019), p. 239.
6. Clarke, p. 7.
7. Kimbles, S.L., Intergenerational Complexes in Analytical Psychology: The Suffering of
Ghosts (Routlege, 2021), p. 18.
8. Fodor, N. The Haunted Mind, (Garrett Publications, 1959), p. 110.
9. Kimbles, p. 22.
10. Belsey, p. 9.
11. Morton, p. 15.
12. ibid, p. 25
13. Kimble, p. 22.
14. Morton, p. 112.
15. ibid, p. 23
16. ibid, p. 15
17. Fodor, p. 110.
18. Kimble, p. 14.
19. Clarke, p, 108.
20. Fodor, p. 34.
21. Belsey, p. 205.
22. Kimble, p. 57.
23. Morton, p. 21.
24. Clarke, p. 204.
25. Fodor, p. 65.
26. Clarke, p. 302.
27. Morton, p. 12.
28. Clarke, p. 24.
29. Belsey, p. 82.
30. Clarke, p. 31.
31. Morton, p. 92.
32. Clarke, p. 245.
33. Kimble, p. 11.
34. Jung, C.G., “The Psychological foundations of Belief in Spirits” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press, 1977) p. 116.
35. Miller, L. The Awakened Brain (Random House, 2021), p. 228.
36. Belsey, p. 184.
37. ibid, p. 138.
38. Freud, S. Civilization and its Discontents, (Norton and Co., 1961), p. 89.
39. Kimble, p. 12.
40. Laing, RD. The Divided Self (Penguin, 1969), p. 114.
41. Jourard, p. 6.
42. Kimble, p. 2.
43. Laing, R.D., Self and Others (Penguin, 1969). p. 37.
44. Belsey, p. 207.
45. Gordon, A.F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (U. of Minnesota Press, 1997). p. xv.
46. Prasinos, S. “Psychology and Sin”, The Fourth R, v. 32, No. 6, 2019, p. 19.
47. Gordon, p. 88.
48. Jung, p. 114.
49. ibid, p. 117.
50. Hillman, J. Re-Visioning Psychology, (Harper Colophon, 1975), p. 42.
51. Bhatia, S. “The Promise of Decolonial Psychology: Re-imagining Psychological Practice and Interventions”, presented at Connecticut Psychological Assoc., November 8, 2024.
52. Hillman, p. 2.
53. Kimble, p. xiii.
54. Jung, p. 120.
55. Jourard, p. 50.
57. Adyashanti, Resurrecting Jesus (Sounds True, 2014), p. 64
58. Hillman, p. 23.
59. Jung, p. 112.
60. Adyashanti, p. 44.
61. ibid, p. xiv.
62. Prasinos, S. “Psychology, Soul and God,” The Fourth R, v. 33, 2020, no. 4, p. 22.
63. Hillman, p. 149.
64. Gordon, p. 22.
65. ibid, p. 41.
66. Hillman, p. 44.

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