About Thomas
T. Lawson
My
wife, Anna, and I live with our dogs near Daleville, a
little place in the mountains of Virginia close to Roanoke.
Our two children are grown and have children of their
own. I spent twenty-seven years as a trial lawyer with
Woods Rogers law firm in Roanoke, Virginia, and am a former
President of the Virginia Bar Association and lecturer
at the University of Virginia Law School. I left the law
in 1992 to paint and pursue my studies on Jung.
How I came
to Jung
I
came to Jung in the course of a personal quest. It had
become clear to me as a young man that religion, as it
had been presented to me, was missing the point. I also
had an inkling that human psychology had a bearing on
whatever the crucial point might be. About the time I
finished law school and got married, I encountered Joseph
Campbell’s magisterial Masks of God and, over time,
read all four volumes. The fact that the same myths occur
everywhere in the world and throughout recorded time struck
me as something that spoke directly to the relation of
humankind to the divine.
Campbell was
a Jungian, and indeed had edited the Penquin Portable
Jung. I read the material collected there and began
to explore Jung further. Along the way I came to Erich
Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness.
Jung’s Forward to that book is such a gripping statement
that I reproduce it in part here:
As
I read through the manuscript of this book it became
clear to me how great are the disadvantages of pioneer
work: one stumbles through unknown regions, one is led
astray by analogies, forever losing the Ariadne thread;
one is overwhelmed by new impressions and new possibilities,
and the worst disadvantage of all is that the pioneer
only knows afterwards what he should have known before.
The second generation has the advantage of a clearer,
if still incomplete, picture; certain landmarks that
at least lie on the frontiers of the essential have
grown familiar, and one now knows what must be known
if one is to explore the newly discovered territory.
Thus forewarned and forearmed, a representative of the
second generation can spot the most distant connections;
he can unravel problems and give a coherent account
of the whole field of study, whose full extent the pioneer
can only survey at the end of his life's work....
[Neumann]
has succeeded in constructing a unique history of the
evolution of consciousness, and at the same time in
representing the body of myths as the phenomenology
of this same evolution. In this way he arrives at conclusions
and insights which are among the most important ever
to be reached in this field.
Naturally
to me, as a psychologist, the most valuable aspect of
the work is the fundamental contribution it makes to
a psychology of the unconscious. The author has placed
the concepts of analytical psychology -- which for many
people are so bewildering -- on a firm evolutionary
basis, and erected upon this a comprehensive structure
in which the empirical forms of thought find their rightful
place.
As I look back
on these words, they contain the genesis of my book. I
wanted to find out how consciousness evolved. The spiritual
dimension that had been my original goal came into place
in the course of that pursuit.
My Paintings
As
mentioned above, when I left the law, there were two arrows
to my bow. I wanted to pursue the Jungian path, and I
wanted to try painting seriously. I have drawn since a
child, and now I am giving painting a go. The results
can be seen on my other site, www.ttlawson.com
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