Psychological Perspectives
A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought
Tender Mercies: Love, Oatmeal, and the Quest for Wholeness
by: Dennis Patrick Slattery
To cite this article: Dennis Patrick Slattery (2016) Tender Mercies: Love, Oatmeal, and the
Quest for Wholeness, Psychological Perspectives, 59:1, 109-119
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2016.1134214
Tender Mercies (1983) is a simple and quiet film that reveals a complexity in its depiction of the many forms love can assume in the soul. Using some of C. G. Jung’s and Robert Johnson’s observations on the dynamic nature of love, the article tracks the plot of Horton Foote’s award-winning screenplay as it unfolds the qualities of love, beginning with romantic love, the most popular form our current culture depicts and promotes, as well as perhaps less glamorous and outwardly exciting forms that nonetheless ground the soul in fuller, more sustainable relations between couples, father and daughter, father and son, as well as the deep passion for what excites and sustains us as creative persons. It also touches on the infernal form of addiction as a kind of fixed and fixated love that harbors no freedom for the individual; an addiction is understood as pornographic to the extent that it continues to promise what it cannot ever deliver, so the individual is always hooked by its fury. By looking closely at various scenes from the film, the author articulates the slow retrieval of one soul
If you think about a topic for a while, something will lead you to a source or even its source, as if the topic becomes its own magnet, drawing to it what is needed for further inquiry. Think, and ye shall receive. When my wife flew out to Santa Barbara to visit me last February, we headed north to San Luis Obispo, then on to Cambria to Route 46 wine country and to Paso Robles, which we had never visited. There, on a Monday morning, we walked around the main square and spotted a small used bookstore. I can never pass up these little gems no matter where they appear.
Click here to read the full article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2016.1134214
