HowardTeich

At the beginning of Solar Light, Lunar Light, Howard Teich thanks Susan Griffin, Springer Teich, Sara Teich, John Beebe, and Kelly Peters for their “love, support, and intellectual companionship.” The words belong together. He presents his years of difficult study as a journey sustained by other people. Before he asks his readers to enter the world of his ideas, he acknowledges the people who have helped him live and think. ⁹

Howard’s life has much of this interweaving in it. A friendship can become an exchange of books and questions. A collaboration can ask something personal of the people doing the work. He can help a writer explore her dreams and agree, in return, to learn from her on the dance floor. His learning travels through relationships, gathering meaning as it goes. ^{1, 24, 25}

There is warmth in that way of living, and there is insistence. Thomas Steding, who worked with Howard on leadership, recalls how persistently Howard brought him back to empathy. The experienced executive eventually found himself recognizing the emotional lives of his colleagues in a different way. In Real Teams Win, he marks the change with surprise: “Then something really weird happened: I developed empathy.” Howard had asked him to practice an ability that professional accomplishment alone had not given him. ¹

That combination of regard and challenge runs through Howard’s work. He makes room for the person who is there, with the feelings and contradictions that person brings. He also keeps asking what else might be possible. His concern reaches toward the tenderness a man has learned to hide, the authority a woman has been discouraged from claiming, the imaginative life obscured by an identity that has become too small. He has given these questions decades of attention as a psychologist, writer, teacher, and collaborator. ^{7, 8, 10}

The sun and moon are his best-known images. The human being who reaches for them is the subject of this tribute: a man willing to question what he was taught, to learn from his own difficulty, to follow an unexpected interest, and to share what he finds. His thought has an individual character because his engagement with life does. It is searching, companionable, and unfinished in the living sense of that word. There is always another conversation to have.

Howard begins his public account of becoming a psychologist with the admission that he needed help himself. He was going through a divorce. He felt hopeless and recognized how much he did not know about dealing with the difficulties of his life. He decided to learn about human behavior and the psyche, hoping to help himself and other people. That decision led toward becoming a therapist and earning a doctorate in clinical psychology. ⁷

In telling that story, he leaves the vulnerable beginning in view. It is a generous thing to acknowledge in a profession whose title can create such distance between the person who helps and the person who asks for help. Howard allows the distance to narrow. The psychologist, too, has been a person who could not simply think his way out of pain.

His education had first taken him into business. The University of Oregon lists his B.B.A. in Marketing and Industrial Management in 1962, followed by graduate study in Personnel and Industrial Management in 1964. His thesis was titled Validity of a Business Game. Management and organizations would remain part of his eventual professional world, but the personal question of how to live had acquired an urgency of its own. ^{5, 6}

Another recollection helps explain why his later work on gender could matter so deeply to him. He writes about growing up with a picture of masculinity organized around aggression, dominance, and achievement. Emotion, intuition, and empathy were assigned to women. “These were taught as genetic truths,” he remembers. Discovering that they were cultural imprints changed his life. He was reconsidering instructions he had once accepted about what being a man required. ²⁷

The rethinking asked something of him before it became something he could offer others. His formation included years of Jungian analysis with Joseph Henderson, John Beebe, and Joan Chodorow. He taught a Berkeley course on dreams and their relation to the unconscious. He read, underwent analysis, practiced, and taught. The questions were allowed to work on the questioner. ⁸

Across the decades, he has worked with individuals, couples, and groups, drawing on several therapeutic traditions. Those professional commitments grew from a beginning he still describes in personal terms: difficulty, a need for understanding, a wish to help. ⁷

This part of Howard’s life gives his concern for human possibility its gravity. Change had to mean something in a life being lived. A more generous account of a person had to be more than an attractive idea. He had reasons to care whether someone could find a way forward when the familiar ways of managing no longer sufficed.

Howard remembers Kiss of the Spider Woman as the film that first inspired his interest in twin-hero psychology. Its two male prisoners, Molina and Valentin, brought very different sensibilities into the same confined world. Their relationship drew his attention toward forms of masculine experience that could challenge and alter one another. ²⁶

He did something with that interest. Remembering Spider Woman’s presence in Navajo mythology, he wrote to Don Sandner, author of Navaho Symbols of Healing. Sandner directed him to Where the Two Came to Their Father, with Maud Oakes’s record of the ceremonial given by Jeff King and Joseph Campbell’s commentary. Howard followed the recommendation toward the twin heroes Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water. ²⁶

A film, a question, a letter, a book: the sequence has the liveliness of an actual mind at work. He was willing to ask someone who knew more, and willing to give sustained attention to the answer. Curiosity became correspondence and then study. The feeling that something mattered was honored with effort.

His reading took him into a less familiar part of Campbell’s work. Where many readers knew the solitary hero, Howard attended to the twins and the relationship between their different powers. In his interpretation, Monster Slayer’s active strength needed the tempering presence of Child Born of Water. The second hero could change what strength itself meant. ³²

He noticed the moments in the stories when anger was answered by a more patient way of gaining cooperation, or when a woman’s right to speak for herself was defended against the wish to compel her. These were passages he chose to dwell on. They reveal the direction of his interest: power becoming more capable of relationship, strength learning to hear something beyond its own intention. ³²

The study could absorb him down to the smallest visible detail. In conversation years later, he recalled trying to understand alchemical illustrations reproduced in black and white. He used descriptions of the original colors and took markers to the reproductions. The act helped him notice connections that had remained obscure. There is something wonderfully unpretentious in the account: a scholar prepared to color the pictures because that might help him understand them. ²⁵

His imagination is at home among demanding subjects, but it also has a playful entrance. An essay on Eros and Psyche begins with a joke about a Higgs boson in a church. The troublesome sisters become “Suspicious and Officious.” A reader can hear the storyteller enjoying himself. He wants the ancient story to live in the room. ¹⁶

Howard’s curiosity gives his seriousness air. He can devote himself to a difficult idea and still welcome a joke, a film, a conversation, an image that asks to be seen differently. The range of his interests comes from this readiness to follow what catches his attention. His books and essays are among the things that have grown from it.

Learning deeply from others has not prevented Howard from disagreeing with them. His most distinctive intellectual contribution arose within the Jungian tradition in which he had worked on himself. He questioned the language that asked men to encounter a feminine side and women a masculine side. He wanted to know whether that language kept a person’s own abilities at a distance. ^{8, 10}

For Howard, tenderness need not be foreign to a man’s nature, nor authority foreign to a woman’s. His solar and lunar vocabulary names qualities available within each person: focus and initiative, receptivity and feeling, clarity and imagination. The development he seeks asks people to reclaim a fuller range of themselves. His particular attention to lunar masculinity gives emotional depth a place within manhood. ¹⁰

The distinction carries a personal generosity. It offers someone who has learned to distrust a quality a way of recognizing it as their own. A man’s wish to be tender need not put his identity in jeopardy. A woman’s resolve need not be understood as something borrowed. Howard has worked to make those possibilities easier to imagine and speak about. ¹⁰

He also understands that a new insight can become another enclosure. His practical writing warns that even an intuitive discovery may harden into an idealization. He asks for a continuing return to experience. That caution keeps his invitation demanding: a person must remain willing to learn after finding an answer. ¹⁷

A friend’s recollection shows him bringing the same care to another person’s argument. In “Reclaiming Our Indigenous Worldview,” Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez describe Howard’s response to an early draft. A longtime friend and collaborator of Four Arrows, he worried that their contrast between Indigenous and dominant worldviews might itself be read as too dualistic. The authors acknowledge his concern and address it. He was prepared to raise a difficult question within a valued relationship. ³³

The exchange gives substance to his independence. Friendship could include the responsibility to notice where a shared concern had been imperfectly expressed. His care for an idea did not require protecting it from examination. He could help by asking his friends to look again.

Other thinkers have looked again through his work. In Integrity in Depth in 1992, John Beebe used Howard’s formulation to examine the relationship between gender and integrity, including the consequences of projecting masculine receptivity onto women. An analyst with whom Howard had worked was now drawing on Howard’s own thought. Joseph Henderson and Dyane Sherwood later directed readers to that formulation through Beebe’s discussion. ^{2, 15}

Susan Rowland’s 2014 review in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche called his proposed revision of gender symbolism “lucid and groundbreaking.” The praise identifies something definite: the possibility of relating to human abilities without first assigning them to another gender. ³

These are accomplishments worthy of honor. They belong to a man who took his intellectual relationships seriously enough to contribute something independent to them. Howard could learn from Henderson and Beebe and still become someone whose thinking gave them work of their own to consider. Gratitude and originality found room beside each other.

Howard’s concern for people includes the parts of experience that are difficult to welcome. His writing on dreams returns to feelings and images a person would rather reject: the embarrassing weakness, the frightening impulse, the admission that does not fit the preferred account of the self. He brings the language of alchemy to this material, seeing in it something that can be worked with. ³⁰

That is a hopeful stance toward human difficulty. The unwanted part need not be the end of the story. Howard asks what it might become if it could be approached with attention. His account of transformation emphasizes the need for humility and the openness of what is still uncertain. A personality fixed in its own rightness has little room to develop. ²⁹

His care therefore asks for participation. In the six-step exercise he offers readers, the first movement is to notice a troublesome feeling and meet it with empathy. Then comes the examination of an expectation: what image of life is being defended, and what becomes perceptible when that image is loosened? He brings imagination into the effort to see a familiar difficulty differently. ¹⁷

His example is ordinary enough to be recognizable. A person has been passed over for promotion. The disappointment contains an image of an executive office and an anticipated future. When that image is released in the exercise, another may arise: playing with the children. Howard allows for the discovery that the desired advancement also threatened something the person valued. The example is part of his teaching, a way of making the work understandable. ¹⁷

He takes it all the way home. The insight leads toward a conversation with a spouse, plans for time together, and someone who can witness the intention to act. He is interested in what happens after understanding arrives. A changed image ought to be able to make a difference in the way a day is spent. ¹⁷

In a public reply to a dream about an ex-partner and a baby, he asks what new possibility the relationship awakened that never came into being. His attention turns toward what the dreamer might still be able to develop. A loss may have left something unfinished that remains the dreamer’s to care for. This is his interpretation, offered in response to that particular dream; the concern is with a life that can continue to unfold. ¹⁸

His voice can be direct and encouraging. A crystal dream receives an opening congratulation. Other replies close with “Hope this helps.” The informality is part of their warmth. The person asking the question remains someone being addressed, someone for whom the answer is meant to be useful. ¹⁸

It takes a particular kind of seriousness to carry an interest in mythology back into a conversation with a spouse, or to let an elaborate interpretation end with such a simple wish. Howard has given the symbolic world an everyday purpose. His imagination keeps returning to the life someone will have to live when the reading or the conversation is over.

The breadth of Howard’s working life is considerable. His writing has appeared in anthologies and journals; his teaching has taken him through universities and Esalen; his consulting has brought him into major corporations. Across these settings, he has remained interested in the person whose feelings, expectations, and imagination are helping to shape what happens. ⁸

He contributed “The Twins: An Archetypal Perspective” to Christine Downing’s Mirrors of the Self in 1991. The next year, his chapter on Campbell’s solar and lunar vision appeared in Kenneth L. Golden’s Uses of Comparative Mythology. “Sun and Moon” followed in Parabola in 1994, and “A Dual Masculinity” in the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal in 1995. His ideas acquired form through the sustained work of writing, finding readers in several intellectual communities. ^{12, 13, 14, 11}

Genoa House published Solar Light, Lunar Light: Perspectives in Human Consciousness in 2012. It brought personal history, psychological inquiry, and practical exercises together. Endorsements by Richard Tarnas, Theodore Roszak, and Susan Griffin recognized its philosophical, therapeutic, and human concerns. The book gave a lasting form to work Howard had been developing and sharing over many years. ⁹

Teaching has been another means of giving that work to others. His professional biography names the University of California, the California Institute of Integral Studies, Sonoma State University, the University of San Francisco, and Esalen. California State University, Northridge, identifies him among the guides in its self-care program, using Campbell’s hero and heroine journeys to approach the subject. He has brought his learning to people who arrive with different experiences and different reasons for wanting to understand. ^{8, 19}

In organizations, the need to understand another person can come under the pressure of responsibility. Howard’s clients have included Microsoft, Intel, and Wells Fargo; the University of Oregon’s alumni publication also names Clorox, HP, and SAP. Here the business education of his early years meets the work of the psychologist. ^{8, 20}

His leadership writing asks people to become aware of how their own habits shape what they are able to perceive. A firm conviction may need receptivity; a wish to please may need greater self-possession. He describes balance as an active process of adjustment. His image of cooperating acrobats suggests how much attention to another person is involved in keeping an undertaking alive. ^{21, 31}

The PACE Profile likewise attends to motivation and engagement with an emphasis on growth. Howard’s description resists fixing a person permanently inside a type. It asks where someone is now and how that person might develop. That preference belongs to the same generosity that runs through his other work: an account of a person ought to leave room for movement. ^{8, 22}

Steding’s recollection tells what such work could ask of an accomplished collaborator. Developing their approach to organizational mindset together, he found himself loosening his attachment to his own favored solutions and becoming more attentive to the emotional currents in a team. He credits Howard’s insistence on empathy with that change. Their work reached into the way one man exercised his responsibilities toward others. ¹

Howard carried the concern further in Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, edited by Karin Lofthus Carrington and Susan Griffin and published by the University of California Press in 2011. He served as a consultant and contributed “Our Culture’s Divided Soul.” The volume received recognition in the 2012 Gradiva Awards. ^{4, 8}

In his essay, he asks what happens when compassion, reflection, and relationship are excluded from responses to violence. He applies the question to opposing sides of conflict, including terrorist organizations and Western governments. The effort places his psychological concerns within a larger moral responsibility: the ways human beings imagine one another have consequences for the world they make together. ²³

The man who entered psychology through the difficulty of his own life had brought his attention into widening circles. His work with an individual, a group of leaders, or a collective cultural question has a continuity of purpose. He keeps asking people to become more conscious of what they bring to an encounter—and of what they may have failed to see in the person before them.

Howard’s serious interests leave room for pleasure. His Eros and Psyche essays concern joy; he writes about love with the imagination of someone for whom stories remain alive. He is drawn to the difference between an idealized relationship and the more difficult, conscious meeting that becomes possible when an image of perfection gives way. The trials in the myth ask for help, patience, and different abilities working together. ^{16, 27}

In the concluding essay, he carries the story toward forms of expression a reader can actually undertake: writing, dancing, sharing an insight with another person. What has been discovered asks to be lived. The interest in movement and relationship is there in the way he chooses to bring the story to an end. ²⁸

Camille Cusumano’s recollection gives that reciprocity a personal form. She and Howard agreed to exchange her dance lessons for his interpretation of her dreams. Each could offer something the other wanted to learn. It is an affectionate detail in a life with many professional distinctions: the psychologist could also agree to become a student. ²⁴

His conversations with Clay Boykin and Dennis Tardan have the ease of people who know one another. Boykin calls him a friend and jokes about how much it costs to follow his book recommendations. Tardan thanks him for changing the way he sees. Howard brings his interests into the conversation and continues exploring them with his hosts. The pleasure is in the pursuit together. ²⁵

These exchanges allow the friendship around the work to be felt. There are people with whom he can share an enthusiasm, people who bring him questions, people from whom he can receive something in return. His learning has made occasions for company. It has given others books to read, ideas to try, and reasons to keep a conversation going.

That mutuality matters in a portrait of Howard. He has spent years thinking about the capacities people can recover within themselves, and his own relationships include the willingness to receive. The man who has something to teach can remain someone to whom something may be shown. There is a quiet freedom in that, and an enduring invitation to friendship.