A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story

Psychologist, popular author and leading figure in the human potential movement, Houston absorbed a sense of wonder from her Sicilian-born mother, Mary, a former stock-and-bond analyst who claims to see angels, and from her father, Jack, a TV and radio comedy writer for Eddie Cantor, George Burns and Henny Youngman. Her peripatetic girlhood, spent in Hollywood in the 1940s and in New York, Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis and New Orleans, was disrupted at the age of 14 when her father announced that he was divorcing her mother to marry another woman. Coping with grief and loss, discovering one's ``Essence self'' and tapping latent creative potential are abiding themes of this unorthodox, continually surprising spiritual autobiography. Houston believes that myths and archetypes can provide keys linking our local lives to larger patterns unfolding on the planet and in the cosmos. In that context, she discusses her identification with the goddess Athena, her mystical experiences, psychedelic trips and explorations of altered states of consciousness, her myth-reenacting workshops and her encounters with Margaret Mead, Paul Tillich, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Martin Buber and Gestalt psychologist Fritz Perls. $75,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Jan.)