Keith’s Book: A Love Story is a captivating fictionalized memoir about the love story of the celebrated Jungian Analyst and best-selling author, Linda Schierse Leonard, with her soulmate, psychiatrist Dr. Keith Chapman–– a compelling true-love story that provides life-changing insights into the psychological experiences, successes, harms, and survival of lives touched by alcoholism, while searching for love, beauty, and soul on the quest for spiritual meaning.
Leonard invites the reader to a dramatic journey on the path of love, companionship, and need. It portrays Linda’s intense journey to win love and feel the true high of spiritual meaning. Linda writes of her dearest soulmate, Dr. Keith Chapman, a brilliant, devoted psychiatrist, as they travel a life-path literally blessed with adventures, hiking the high mountains in Colorado, Switzerland, South America, Africa, and even treading the snowy reaches of the Arctic Circle. As brave adventurers, they follow their dreams and quest for spiritual communion, self-understanding, and fulfillment. And yet Linda’s love with Keith, an exuberant dreamer, is vexed by shared wounds of addiction that steal joy, ruin families, tear away the companionship most needed in the search for soul. And so in this love story they also experience the abyss of despair, freezing losses, and griefs that rend their hearts with pain. Yet, through a lifetime, they choose one another––a love story.
Praise for Keith’s Book: A Love Story
“This is the story of a strange, crazy, unprogrammed, courageous, adventurous journey of two souls in love, a musical duet totally improvised. We see inner lives totally exposed to time and circumstance, trusting, doubting, mystically uniting. Keith’s Book is a love story in all the depth and complexity of psychic truth. And what a joy to read!”
––Murray Stein, author of Jung’s Map of the Soul: Deeper Explorations
“The moment I finished reading Keith’s Book: A Love Story by Linda Leonard, I realized it is really a work of art. A true picture of an incredible love story that should be widely read. Keith’s Book is even a great educational opportunity to understand the basic archetype’s of Jungian psychology. Intimate and masterfully written, congratulations to Linda Leonard on another beautiful book!”
––Arlene Landau, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, author of Tragic Beauty: The Dark Side of Venus Aphrodite and the Loss and Regeneration of Soul
“Keith’s Book: A Love Story tells the moving story of Linda Leonard’s deep soulmate relationship––the dark as well as the light. I loved it! I had long hoped Leonard would write her autobiography, but this is even better. It’s simultaneously playful and sublime. And it covers many of the important events of her life in a fanciful dialogue with her co-author, who impersonates some of the important characters in her story. Their story, including the life-changing impact of her writing on Bill’s life, eventually finds its way into the dialogue. I found the book completely and utterly superb! Everything is just right––and nothing too much. I hope there’s another book coming.”
––Betty Cannon, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist, President, Boulder Psychotherapy Institute, Founder, Applied Existential Psychotherapy (AEP), author of Sartre and Psychoanalysis
“WOW!! Keith’s Book: A Love Story ––I loved it. It’s a brilliant episodic tale of personal adventures to Kilimanjaro, Siberia, Finland…and through the quest for love between Linda and Keith. I hope these wonderful short chapters are made into a TV streaming series so millions of people can see this brilliant work!”
––Susanne Short, senior Jungian analyst and founding member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York, graduate of the Jungian Institute Zurich, publishes articles in the Jungian Journal of Culture and Psyche
“Our lives are composed of vignettes and emotions: pain, despair, madness, exhilaration, joy. Each moment becomes a catalyst for the evolution of the soul. In this memoir, fictionalized to disguise and protect, Bill Morris helps to ignite the memories and reflections of Jungian Analyst Linda Schierse Leonard, who, with her many books, has helped to guide us in the search for our Selves. In the end, we can see that Linda‘s life has been a grand, if tumultuous, Love Story. May we all find such exquisite love within the dark folds of the Mystery of Existence.”
––Pamela Eakins, Ph.D., Sociologist, Counselor, and Educator; author of Tarot of the Spirit, The Lightning Papers, Visionary Cosmology, and Priestess, co-author (with Bill Morris) of Conversations with Death
“Keith’s Book is a love story through and through, with the ups and downs and the profound learning and joy that comes from caring and the sharing of two lives— growing with one another into a deeply trusting and soulful relationship even beyond death. It is beautifully written by Linda and her dear friend Bill who takes Keith’s voice; one does not want to put it down. It was particularly touching to me, living in Aspen, home to Linda and Keith, where they experienced the gorgeous hikes and trails of the Rockies— a truly magical environment. I hear their voices ring out with laughter in the canyons, wishing they were still here.”
––Nancy Swift Furlotti, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst and author of The Dream and its Amplification; Eternal Echoes: Erich Neumann’s Timeless Relevance to Consciousness, Creativity, and Evil; and The Splendor of the Maya: A Journey into the Shadows at the Dawn of Creation
“I want to thank Linda Leonard and Bill Morris for sharing Keith’s Book: A Love Story, a masterpiece. What a splendid collaboration. I loved the playful/profound dialogue between Keith (masterfully channeled by co-author, Bill) and Linda Leonard in her deep memoir with her soulmate Dr Keith Chapman. What daring adventurers of the heart! There are two voyages: the achingly beautiful love story of Keith and Linda; and the deep, burgeoning friendship between writers Bill and Linda. They are all time-travelers, and I give thanks for taking me on this journey, and weaving together this timeless tapestry of tales and teachings, that deeply touched my soul.”
––Hilary Cadwell, Ph.D., Psychologist; Dance/movement Therapist; Performance Artist; End-of-Life Practitioner
“This is a wildly unconventional love story that flourishes on the edge of the edge and sometimes over the edge. Two originals find and cherish one another, forging between them a third or fourth or fifth. Ultimately it is a story of redemption a deux, interspersed with great hikes and sacred adventures. This daring book reminds me what it was like to be a Jungian in a previous generation. Keith’s Book is a wonder-filled book.”
––Thomas Singer, MD, psychiatrist and a Jungian psychoanalyst and author of many books including A Field Guide to American Cultural Complexes: The Battleground of the Splintered American Psyche
“This book is the record of a decades-long conversation in which the title character, the partner of the best-selling Jungian author whose life he transformed, as she did his, is mostly silent, yet infinitely understanding and engaged. One can feel him hearing from the other side of their mortal lives about an individuation process he so truly shared that it made him whole as well as it continued through developing Alzheimer’s to the conquest of his fear of death. Linda Schierse Leonard thrills at the chance her writing partner, Bill G. Morris, who voices Keith, has given her to continue speaking in dialogue with Keith, a psychiatrist who could listen with the same open heartedness with which she narrates all they discovered in the course of standing by each other through their individual recoveries from their tricky ways of avoiding life, even while seeming to live it to the full. Keith is with Linda through the facing and healing of formidable psychological wounds, and she is the one who helps the man who has shown so much compassion as a doctor to allow other professionals to care for him as a patient. But the real joy of this book is how broadly and deeply they travel through life together. Linda recalls how Keith gave her the courage to climb Kilimanjaro, look straight into the face of God in a dream even though it is part of a volcano, stare down a female celebrity who cannot stop serving up conversation during a classical concert, and share with her ever-curious companion the experience of having one’s deadliest of sins interrogated by the cinema of Kieslowski. This book recognizes that individuation in later life is at its best when it is shared, and Linda does not disappoint the readership she has built since The Wounded Woman, of those of us like to feel we are her truest partner when she is telling stories on herself that only we can completely identify with. To read the book she has addressed so movingly to Keith opens a space in which any psychologically minded reader will feel much less alone.”
––John Beebe, MD, Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a past president of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, author of many books including Psychiatric Treatment: Crisis, Clinic, and Consultation
Table of Contents
Part 1 My Name is Keith
Chapter 1 Hello Again
Chapter 2 Your Name Tag
Chapter 3 Linda, Where Are You?
Chapter 4 Soulmates Meet
Chapter 5 Wading Through Pools of Worry
Chapter 6 In Music We Found Each Other
Chapter 7 Russia, Dostoyevsky, and Tears from Heaven
Chapter 8 Kilimanjaro: Climbing High, Coming Back Low
Chapter 9 God Protects Fools, Drunks, and the Homeless
Chapter 10 Crossing the Lethe, River of Forgetting
Chapter 11 Hiking Electric Pass with the Famous
Chapter 12 Saul, Phyllis, and the Celebrity
Chapter 13 Boiling in Jealousy
Chapter 14 Walking You to Beauty
Chapter 15 Keith’s Good Demons
Chapter 16 Horrors in the Haunted House
Chapter 17 Katherine’s Explore Book Store
Part 2 Keith From the Mountaintop
Chapter 18 Independence Pass
Chapter 19 Cosmic Search for Reindeer
Chapter 20 The Pathfinder
Chapter 21 Caribou Running, Their Antlers a Sea of Beauty
Chapter 22 Creation’s Heartbeat
Chapter 23 Siberia, Synchronicity, and Reindeer
Part 3 From the Wings of Angels
Chapter 24 Two Birds Flying VV
Chapter 25 Back to the Sacred Garden
Chapter 26 Charming Keith’s Sacred Fool
Chapter 27 Ayn Rand–Freed by an Author
Chapter 28 My Professional Path
Chapter 29 The Lovers Reversed
Chapter 30 Cañon City Rodeo Queen–Almost!
Chapter 31 Snooks from Heavenly Pastures
Chapter 32 And Away on Angel Wings You Flew
Chapter 33 Zurich, a First Journey into Myself
Chapter 34 Meeting A Dream Face to Face
Chapter 35 Zurich Wonderland
Chapter 36 My Transference: I Was Totally In Love With Him
Chapter 37 Journeys to Find the Self
Chapter 38 For Madmen Only
Chapter 39 Leaving Paradise
Chapter 40 Death by Fire
Chapter 41 The Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts!
Chapter 42 My Father Dies, The Wounded Woman Born
Chapter 43 The Wounding. The Hurting. The Healing.
Chapter 44 Linda’s Reply to Jean
Chapter 45 Hitting Bottom: A Taste of Bliss
Chapter 46 On the Doorstep of AA
Chapter 47 Travels with Shirley
Chapter 48 Harold and the Misfi t Christmas
Chapter 49 Kali Leads Me to AA
Chapter 50 Four Relapses Four Miracles
Chapter 51 Crises with Keith
Chapter 52 The Honeymoon Journey
Part 4 The Face of Love
Chapter 53 The Face of God
Chapter 54 Our Secret Knowledge
Chapter 55 Creativity and the Veil of Addiction
Chapter 56 Our Pilgrimage to The Black Madonna
Chapter 57 Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Chapter 58 Who You Are to Me
Chapter 59 David Bohm’s Peaceful Dialogue
Chapter 60 Krzysztof Kieslowski Reveals Soul
Chapter 61 Viva Venezuela
Chapter 62 Ireland and the Mystery Man
Chapter 63 Death of an Analyst
Chapter 64 At 75 I Chose Keith
Chapter 65 When Song Transcends Separation
Chapter 66 Mother Death
Chapter 67 Anna’s Miracle–My Father’s Ancestry
Chapter 68 Walking The Way of Saint James
Chapter 69 The Firebird
Epilogue Healing Keith at Home
About The Authors
