Holding Center: Ecopsychological Portraitures on the Poetics of Place Becoming Real; Seeing Through the Eyes of the Velveteen RabbitFishing for the Salmon of KnowledgeTalking about Dreams, Bones, and the FutureThe Study of Dreams from Freud to JungNew Grange: The Mystery of Speech

More Depth Psychology Articles, Essays, and Poetry

“Recordar” by Debra Goldman

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Spring/Summer 2015

D E P T H I N S I G H T SS e e i n g t h e W o r l d W i t h S o u l

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About this Issue

Table of Contents

Depth Insights, Issue 7

PublisherDepth Insights, a Media Partner for Depth Psychology Alliance

Co-Editors This IssueBonnie Bright & Jesse Masterson

Layout and DesignGreatGraphicLayouts.com/ Stephanie Kunzler with Bonnie Bright

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Note: Opinions expressed by the authors contained in this issue do not necessarily reflect those ofDepth Insights or its editors, publisher, or representative. Copyright of content remains with theauthors & artists. Copyright of the eZine & design belongs to Depth Insights™. No part of this publica-tion may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher.

We are here in this community ofDepth Insights brought together underthe auspices of depth psychology. As wego about research, writing, teaching, therapy, or as practitioners, how often dowe stop and consider our individual sociallocation? Social location is critical as weengage communities (Kovach, 2010;Smith, 2012).

Knowing ourselves and where we aresocially located moves us away fromuniversalizing our individual experience asthe experience of all peoples. Knowingour individual social location gives us an understanding of the impacts race,gender, sexual orientation, economicclass, and the myriad of ways we identifyourselves and are identified by others. Itbecomes imperative as we work in depthpsychology to understand our individualsocial location and the many ways it inter-sects with depth psychology.

Equally important to our work in depthpsychology is the personal exploration ofthe purpose of our work or in not sosubtle terms, how do we become clear, toourselves and to others, what the motivations are behind what we are doing

Cont’d on page 7

From the Editor

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring 2015

Holding Center: EcopsychologicalPortraitures on the Poetics of PlaceBy Dana Swain

Becoming Real: Seeing Through theEyes of the Velveteen RabbitBy Marta Koonz

Fishing for the Salmon of KnowledgeBy Catherine Svehla

A Soul Unleashed: The Archetype ofPartnership, Dangerous Beauty andthe Art of RelationshipBy Cathy Lynn Pagano

New Grange: The Mystery of SpeechBy John Woodcock

The Study of Dreams from Freud to JungBy Elise Wardle

Talking About Dreams and BonesBonnie Bright in Conversation withAuthors Russell Lockhart and PacoMitchell

Review of Jung and Phenomenologyby Roger BrookeBy Matthew Gildersleeve

“Liana’s Sacred Hands”: New Myth #67By Willi Paul

W. P. BasilMary Ann Bencivengo R. L. BoyerMatthew FishlerMelissa La FlammeDonna MayEva RiderJ R RomanyshynRoy Rosenblatt

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POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

Debra Goldman (includes our cover art this issue)Vera Long

ART

From the pen of Jesse Masterson:

“Conversations between a Psychologist and a Poet” 2015Poetry Contest sponsored by Depth Psychology AllianceMary Pierce Brosmer (Winner)Roz Bound (Honorable Mention)Bonnie Pfeiffer (Honorable Mention)

ADDITIONAL POETRY

On the cover:“Recordar”, "to passback through theheart", encaustic painton board, 16"x12", 2014by Debra Goldman

See more of Debra’swork on page 21

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 2<Back to TOC

One thing is certain: the very act ofputting the nonhuman world at theperiphery of what is cultivatedmarginalizes Nature . . . What if thesupposed margin is itself center?(Casey, 1993, p. 186).

Ecopsychology is a relativenewcomer to the psychological

scene, emerging in the latter part of the20th century to address the peculiar andparticular pathos of the modern human—alienation from our ecological roots.Theodore Roszak, who coined the term,understood that it is a new discipline butan old path, one that indigenous cultureshave walked for millennia. According toRoszak (1992), “Ecopsychology seeks toheal the more fundamental alienationbetween the recently created urbanpsyche and the age-old natural environ-ment” (para. 9). Ecopsychology has closeaffiliation with Jungian depth psychologyparticularly because both disciplinesrecognize the reality of the unconscious,and accept that psyche and nature existnot as separate entities that orbit eachother, but as a continuum of an animatedexpression. A basic tenant of ecopsychol-ogy is that there is a “synergistic interplaybetween planetary and personal well-being . . . the needs of the planet are theneeds of the person, the rights of theperson are the rights of the planet” (para.13).

The discipline of ecopsychology isthe study of the psyche’s relationshipwith its natural environment, her funda-mental home. When we reflect on one,we are reflecting on the other. JamesHillman (n.d.), recognized by many as thefounder of archetypal psychology said,“an individual’s harmony with his or her‘own deep self’ requires not merely ajourney to the interior but a harmonizingwith the environmental world” (n.d, para.6). Philosopher Edward Casey (1993)suggests that nature too, has its interior-ity and can never be completely separatefrom us, because there is no ultimateCartesian boundary of “in here” and “outthere.” (p. 187).

Place is a fundamental reality that itis often overlooked. Place is the earth,the landscape, the region, the home, andeven the body. Differing places elicit theirown unique contemplations, their ownvoices, but it requires someone to takethe time to attune and witness them.Place is also narrative, because it is in thenarrative about place that our interiorityof imagination interweaves with themateriality of “place-ness,” which in turncreates a field of reciprocity, and in reci-procity we are never alone. It is poeticnarrative that navigates the interiorizedand exteriorized landscape best becausepoetics hold the essence of narrativemost closely in the formation of image,which touches our emotions and ourexperiences most intimately, drawing usin a closer embrace to our natural world.When we care for places, we are caringfor our own subjective vivacity, tendingour own creative imagination, forminginner realms and regions as we attemptto responsibly, thoughtfully, participate inthe formation and stewardship of theregions of the earth.

In our post-modern culture ourhigh-speed, high-tech urbanized land-scape has left us fundamentallydisoriented. Not only has modern culture“paved paradise and put up a parking lot”(Mitchell, 1970) in most every developedand developing nation in the world, werarely have the time to notice what hastranspired. We seem to be stumblingafter an idea of center that is alwaystantalizingly out of reach, and somehowhas become conflated with the ideologyof consumerism. The phenomenological

reality is that center is always in the pres-ent, always wherever one is, always innature because we exist within nature.Casey (1993) asks the fundamental andobvious question that our lack of mindful-ness repeatedly overlooks:

What if Nature is the true a priori,that which was there first, that fromwhich we come, that which sustainsus even as we cultivate andconstruct? . . Nature is not justaround us; or rather, there is nogetting around Nature, which is at alltimes under us, indeed in us. In thisregard, Nature can be considered the‘Encompassing’ . . . in the literalsense of the word, ‘to be within thecompass of.’ (p. 186)

This essay is a contemplation ofaspects of nature as center, as landscape,as a priori space and place, as it changesin form, in function, in expression, butalways reflects and dialogues with thepsyche of the human world. Gary Snyder(1990), in his book, Practice of the Wildsuggests, “It is not enough just to ‘lovenature’ or to want to ‘be in harmony withGaia.’ Our relation to the natural worldtakes place in a place, and it must begrounded in information and experience”(p. 42).

The Symbolic Landscape

Since Neolithic times humans haveleft evidence all over the earth of theircommunion, worship, and celebration ofnature. Egyptians made pyramids so thatpharaohs could be laid to rest with manyof their worldly belongings so they wouldnot pass through the gateway of theunderworld empty handed. Older stillthan the pyramids are the henges andmegalithic structures scattered through-out the landscape of the United Kingdom.These henges ranged from singular sitesof worship that seem to have alignedwith astrological aspects, like that ofStonehenge, to sites such as the Aveburyhenge that appears to have been acomplex of sites used to celebrate life,death, and seasonal rituals (Devereux,

Holding CenterEcopsychological Portraitures on the Poetics of Place

By Dana Swain

“Differing places elici ttheir own unique

contemplations, theirown voices, but itrequires someone to

take the time to attuneand witness them”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 20153 <Back to TOC

1992, p. 116). There are thousands ofsacred or symbolic sites in the landscapeacross the globe, and they speak to anolder way of acknowledging, respecting,and living with nature. While some siteswere chosen for their relationship to thelandscape or to the sun, moon, and stars,other sites seem arbitrary to our modernmind, but no doubt held deep, culturalrelevance.

Snyder (1990) suggests that placesin the landscape are given a sacred mean-ing by the cultural heritage endemic to aplace, by the elevated amounts of wildlifein the area, or for stories that happenedat the site, or even for qualities in theearth that resemble human or animalform—such as faces that seem toprotrude from rocky areas. Snyder notesthat “these places are gates throughwhich one can . . . more easily betouched by a larger-than-human, larger-than-personal, view” (p.100).

Casey (1993) delves even moredeeply into the subtlety of the atmos-phere of place. For Casey, perhapsbeyond concrete appearance or fruitful-ness and fertility of an area there is apresence in nature itself that humanssense when they perceive it as sacred:

The atmosphere is more thoroughlypervasive of wilderness than anyother factor . . . It is the wildwiseequivalent of what Heidegger calls‘moodwise situatedness’(Befindlichkeit). Atmosphere embod-ies the emotional tonality of a wildplace, its predominant mood. Whenwe are in such a place, we sense itnot only as continuous with our ownfeeling—or as reflecting that feel-ing—but also as itself containingfeeling . . .The atmosphere perme-ates everything. (p. 219)

Casey links the word “atmosphere”etymologically with the meaning ofsmoke and breath, and notes that itshares a root with the Sanksrit “atman,”which means “Self” and “soul” which isalso linked etymologically with “breath”(p. 219). The breath for eastern medita-tion practices and philosophies isassociated with pure consciousness, orthat which leads to pure consciousness.Perceiving Nature’s atmosphere in thismanner means attuning to an all-perva-sive sense of consciousness, sentiency,and presence in the landscape.

Like a Mobius strip, comprised of asingle, non-orientable surface, the atmos-phere of place and the atmosphere ofhuman interiority iteratively and organi-cally intermingle. If we experienceconsciousness and presence withinourselves, we also experience it “outthere” in the primeval landscape wherepresence existed first, long beforehumans had the capacity to detect it. Ifwe fall into the hubristic perspective ofthe primacy of the subjective ego aboveall other forms of consciousness, thelandscape does not lose its sentiency; itsgift of itself is simply removed from us byour own ignorant agency.

The Imaginal Landscape

What I term here the imaginal land-scape is concurrent with the symboliclandscape, but with a subtle difference. Idefine “symbol” in the manner C.G. Jungdefined it, as the image that arises fromthe unconscious, whether personal orcollective, that has a particularlycompelling affective quality associatedwith its archetypal foundation. The imagi-nal as I am conceiving it, is closer toHenry Corbin’s concept of the creativeimagination. According to Corbin, thecreative imagination is an organ ofperception that lies between the rationalconscious thought process and theobjects of perception, and “a means bywhich we perceive symbols” (Cheetham,2012, p. 102). The symbolic landscape isperceived through the imaginal organ ofperception, which is co-located—orpervasive—to both human beings and thelandscape. In this sense the imaginallandscape and the atmosphere of placeare closely attuned.

French philosopher GastonBachelard (1958) meditates on a similarconcept that links the imagination to the

landscape in his book, The Poetics ofSpace. He suggests that the daydream,similar to fantasy and perhaps cousin toJung’s concept of active imagination, hasa tendency to muse about grandeur, orimmensity. In so doing, a particular qual-ity of subjective space ensues thatresembles infinity (p. 183). It is throughquiet contemplation that a persondaydreams, or activates the creativeimagination, and the objects of contem-plation are forms that exist in the world.The immensity that lies within as imagi-nation or daydream is also external inspace, and the two have a symbiotic rela-tionship:

It would seem, then, that it isthrough their ‘immensity’ that thesetwo kinds of space—the space of inti-macy and the world space—blend.When human solitude deepens, thenthe two immensities touch andbecome identical . . . In this coexis-tentialism every object invested withintimate space becomes the centerof all space. For each object, distanceis the present, the horizon exists asmuch as the center. (p. 203)

Bachelard suggests that “each newcontact with the cosmos renews ourinner being, and that every new cosmosis open to us when we have freedourselves from the ties of a former sensi-tivity” (p. 206).

James Hillman (1982) holds asimilar notion, but situates his argumentpsychologically. Hillman suggests that thepopular western view of a subjectivepsychic reality and an external deadworld of objects is a limited and lop-sidedview. He re-introduces the term animamundi or “world soul,” as the Platonistsconceived it (p. 101). Hillman suggeststhe world soul is not to be found in atranscendent world or a kind of unifyinglife principle that runs throughout theworld:

Rather let us imagine the animamundi as that particular soul-spark,that seminal image, which offersitself through each thing in its visibleform. Then anima mundi indicatesthe animated possibilities presentedby each event as it is, its sensuouspresentation as a face bespeaking itsinterior image—in short, its availabil-ity to imagination, its presence as apsychic reality. (p. 101)

Holding Center

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“The breath for eastern meditation

practices and philosophies is

associated with pureconsciousness, or thatwhich leads to pure

consciousness”

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For Hillman, it is not that we psycho-logically project our internal psychic lifeonto objects, but that objects contain inthemselves their own expression thatcompels us and enlivens the imagination.It is not only when a thing is beautifulthat we are attracted to it, but that “thesoul of the thing corresponds orcoalesces with ours” (p. 102). Hillmanargues for an aesthetic sensibilitytowards the world. He says, “the animamundi is simply not perceived if theorgan of this perception remains uncon-scious by being conceived only as aphysical pump or a personal chamber offeeling” (p. 108). If this organ of percep-tion is the creative imagination, then it isthrough the aesthetic sensibility of thecreative imagination that the animated,alive ontological atmosphere of theanima mundi is perceived.

Jung, Casey, Corbin, Bachelard, andHillman all point to facets of an emerging(and already eminent to many non-west-ern cultures) ecological image: anensouled natural environment that is notas separate as our western culturalworldview conceives of it. It is an imageof the natural world that interacts with usnot only physiologically, but also symboli-cally and imaginally. We can experiencethis reality directly when we take thetime to notice it, become still and engageour imagination and our aesthetic sensi-bility, and relativize the ego from itsdominant position in our perception,which blocks a more comprehensivevision.

The Mythopoetic and CulturalLandscape

As long as humans are interactingwith the natural environment, there isculture. Part of culture is the poeticnarrative of myth. One function of mythsis to speak about the origins of the worldand the role of the people within thatcosmological order. Myths often holddeep psychological wisdom and truth.Myths are embedded in the landscape, asif the landscape invoked the myths andthe culture itself by its presence. Theforms in myth are taken from form in thelandscape; the way a culture develops—cuisines, language, wardrobes,architecture, and stories—are all at leastpartially dictated by the landscape. Thelandscape evokes its own expression inpart through the humans who are occu-

pying its domain. This is not to say thatthe landscape requires humans forexpression, rather that the inter-subjec-tivity of physical, symbolic, and imaginallandscape with the human psyche createsa third field of expression that is culture.Depending on the landscape the cultureis enmeshed in, certain archetypal ener-gies embedded in the land will also beapparent in the culture.

Jung often spoke of the importanceof myth for a culture. Myth impliedmeaning, direction, and archetypal andpsychological truths. While entirecultures would adhere to a particularmythic story, Jung believed in the neces-sity for personal myth as well. Withoutthe individual mythic narrative a personwould suffer from lack of meaning. Partof Jung’s own myth, and no doubt hisway of connecting deeply to emanationsof new myths arising in his psyche, was tospend time in nature. He built his owntower home in Bolligen, Switzerland,where he could escape the chatter andbusyness of the city. Jung (1961) wrote:

At times I feel as if I am spread outover the landscape and inside things. . . There is nothing in the Towerthat has not grown into its own formover the decades, nothing with whichI am not linked. Here everything hasits history, and mine; here is spacefor the spaceless kingdom of theworld’s and the psyche’s hinterland.(pp. 225-226)

At the same time, traveling to otherlocations and experiencing the atmos-phere and people of a totally unknownregion tremendously inspired Jung. Hewas impressed and overwhelmed by NewYork, moved deeply in Taos, New Mexico,by a Native American who instigated hisrealization that the European civilization“had another face—the face of a bird ofprey seeking with cruel intentness fordistant quarry” (Jung, 1961, p. 248), andfelt a deep kinship with Africa and the

African people. Something stirred Jungdeeply when witnessing a solitary Africanwarrior on a ridge. Jung wrote,

I had the feeling that I had alreadyexperienced this moment and hadalways known this world which wasseparated from me only by distancein time . . . I could not guess whatstring within myself was plucked atthe sight of that solitary dark hunter.I know only that his world had beenmine for countless millennia. (p. 254)

The experience of different land-scapes and cultures gave Jung access tohis own psychic depths in a manner hewould not have experienced by staying inSwitzerland.

These quotes from Jung arepersonal narratives with mythic andcultural implications for all. When wewitness the landscape, regardless ofwhether it is our place of origin or a placealien to us, we are dialoguing consciouslyor unconsciously with nature, as with theurge to travel, to see new sites, to hike amountain because one can. The explicitgoal may not be to have a dialogue withnature, with the landscape, or to deepenour psychological knowing and healing asa result of this dialogue, but often that isthe unconscious urge.

The Global Soul in a Techno-fiedLandscape?

The ideal situation to heal the earthas we heal ourselves is to engage thenatural environment through theconcrete and the imaginal, having thetime and the solitude to tune into theinteriority of psyche as human andpsyche as world, and experiencing theinterconnection, indeed the continuum,of beingness between the two. This iswhat ecopsychologists strive to bring tohuman awareness. But what is thecurrent reality of our global life? If ournatural world is a reflection of the stateof the soul in humans as well as theearth, we are in dire straits. Our technol-ogy has given us access to vast amountsof information and led to profoundbreakthroughs in many science and tech-nologies, but it has sped up the livedexperience of time. When time is of theessence, everything is urgent, but there isno sitting with the essence of time.Particularly for Westerners, timebecomes a series of tasks, the next text,

Dana Swain

“Something stirred Jungdeeply when

witnessing a soli taryAfrican warrior on a ridge”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 20155 <Back to TOC

the next bauble of information to playwith. Studies show that the speed oftechnology has withered our ability tofocus for long periods of time because wehave become addicted to quick bytes ofdata to download like junk food thatnever satisfies. Andy Fisher (2013), inRadical Ecopsychology, gets to the crux ofour addiction to technology when heinsightfully observes, “we generallyprefer to stimulate ourselves . . . ratherthan to resensitize ourselves. To theextent that we can do the latter,however, the benefits are tremendous,for (among other gains) we reclaim acentre for ourselves” (p. 183).

Technology has also made the entireworld more accessible through trans-portation and travel, allowingengagement with many different land-scapes. There is a diversification ofcultural populations in foreign countriesnever seen before, much of it a result ofdislocation from countries in economic ormilitary conflict. The friction of culturesintermixing at a furious rate is akin to aglobal Tower of Babel with no one speak-ing the same language or currency ofculture, scattered over the planet indizzying and disorienting arrays. It as ifthe earth itself is muttering through all itsdifferent languages, feeling the loss of itsown mythic meaning. Pico Iyer (2000)addresses this postmodern dilemma inhis book The Global Soul. Iyer suggeststhis “global soul” is part of a new mytharising, one that is as problematic as it isa potential opportunity. For Iyer, theglobal soul:

Would be facing not just newanswers to the old questions but awhole new set of questions . . . Hissense of obligation would be differ-ent, if he felt himself part of no fixedcommunity, and his sense of home, ifit existed at all, would lie in the tiesand talismans he carried round withhim. Insofar as he felt a kinship withanyone, it would, most likely, be withother member of the Deracination-state. (p. 53)

There are potential rewards in thislevel of diversity. There are possibilitiesfor new ways of being in the world, adeepening of understanding of our ownhumanity and of working with the earth.However the negative potentials are justas obvious and just as frequent. We expe-

rience more alienation, more conflict,more overuse and squandering ofresources. There exists a tension of oppo-sites in the global psyche of epicproportions. This tension revolves aroundthe question of how to stay connected toplace, to a sense of home, to the earthitself that gives us (and has for millennia)a sense of center, when the center is infact not holding. This is the tension thatthe ecopyschologist must endure. Theecopsychologist must look back as he orshe looks forward to what is, to the mythas it is actually emerging, not only to oldmyths that we wish to hang on to or re-instate. It is a tension of holding our veryrootedness to the earth, with our techno-nomadic wanderings that will onlyincrease. To be ecopsychological is toremember the old ways while becomingattuned to what is newly emerging. It isbirthing a psyche into the world thathasn’t forgotten where it comes from,but learns to find center everywhere.

So how do we find center every-where? I think Iyer hints at this in theabove quotation. It is in “the ties andtalismans” one carries around. Theetymology of the word talisman goesback to the ancient Greek word “telos,”or completion and wholeness, and“telein,” a religious rite. When weconsciously carry our sacred connectionswith us, whether as object, memory, ornarrative, we are staying whole andcomplete. When we tell stories of ourhome, create rituals where we are, andlisten to the stories of others, we areweaving a new myth in the present time,one more complex and intricate than anythat has yet emerged. We tie ourselves to

place, wherever we find it, and forhowever long. This requires an awarenessthat our manic cosmopolitan pace rarelyallows for, and so discerning times fortechnology and times to abstain fromtechnology is also required. Holding tocenter means truly experiencing centereverywhere—within ourselves and withinthe landscape. The pace at which thelandscape slips by us, like a scene on amovie screen, increases exponentially,but the center is the screen and thescreen is the earth and there is no placethat is not earth, so we must tend to thiscenter whether as interior or exteriorlandscape. As Fischer (2013) says, weresensitize ourselves, not by feeding oursensitivities, but by recalibrating oursensing bodies to the world around us.

As we listen and witness the individ-ual and collective narratives of psycheand culture, we begin to hear the voice ofthe earth speaking through us a part ofour shared creative imagination. Perhapsthe answers to our dilemmas lie not justin our conscious rational minds, but areembedded in the earth, as they alwayshave been and always will be, whetherwe heed the increasingly drowned outvoices of the earth or not. Perhaps a newmyth is emerging as old ones disinte-grate, and the chaos of now is the psychicdisorder before a new order can unfold.Ecopsychologists are part of the emergingmyth, as champions and psychopompsfor and from the more-than-humanworld.

References

Bachelard, G. (1958). The poetics ofspace: The classic look of how we experi-ence intimate places. Boston, MA: BeaconPress.

Casey, E. (1993). Getting back into place:Toward a renewed understanding of theplace-world. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press.

Devereux, P. (1992). Secrets of ancientand sacred places: The world’s mysteriousheritage. London, UK: Blandford.

Fisher, A. (2013). Radical ecopsychology:Psychology in the service of life. Albany,NY: Suny Press.

Hillman, J. (1982). The thought of theheart and the soul of the world.Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications.

Holding Center

“The frict ion of cultures intermixing at afurious rate is akin toa global Tower ofBabel with no onespeaking the same

language or currency ofculture, scattered overthe planet in dizzyingand disorienting arrays”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 6<Back to TOC

Hillman, J. (1995). A psyche the size of the earth. EcologicalBuddhism: A Buddhist response to global warming. Retrievedfromhttp://www.ecobuddhism.org/wisdom/psyche_and_spirit/james_hillman/

Iyer, Pico. (2000). The global soul: Jet lag, shopping malls, and thesearch for home. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Jung, C.G. (1961). Memories, dreams, reflections, New York, NY:Vintage Books.

Silko, L.M. (1996). Yellow woman and a beauty of the spirit:Essays on Native American life today. New York, NY: Simon &Schuster.

Roszak, T. (1992). Ecopsychology: Eight principles. Grand Rapids,MI: Phanes Press, Inc.

Snyder, G. (1990). The practice of the wild. Berkeley, CA:Counterpoint.

Dana Swain is a doctoral Candidate in Jungian and ArchetypalStudies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California.She has lived in many different landscapes, including that ofAngola, Brazil, and currently Indonesia. As a movement-basedexpressive arts facilitator, Ms. Swain also considers the body asan personal landscape that expresses not only the personalconsciousness, but holds the deep inner wisdom of our collectivelandscapes—both conscious and unconscious.

Dana Swain

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 20157 <Back to TOC<Back to TOC

Deliver us all from the naked in heart. Eudora Welty

Swimming laps, hand over hand / flutter kick/flutter kick,I think of you,Eudora, spinster of Jackson.

I wonder at your moonflower storiessweet-smelling, darkness-lovingopening in the ordered gardenof your genteel life.

touch the wall, surge, ahh... instant of pure flow, held breath,

I imagine you in church clotheswhite gloves, pocketbook, hat,

hand over hand, flutter kick, flutter kick

I cannot imagine you naked, suppleor ever sensuous, save on the pageahhhhhhhh. . .

where word after word,touch the naked heartpure flow, held breath, ecstasycarries you, writing,down,

and me, remembering while swimming,your doomed-beautiful characters

to depths I, living naked in heart,do not wish to be delivered from.

Mary Pierce Brosmer is a poet, transformative educator and a whole systemsthinker, Founder of Women Writing for (a) Change which has affiliate sites in fivecities. Mary hosted Writing for Change on PBS affiliate, WVXU, from 1998-2005.Mary was co-founder of Inside/Outside: a Prison Arts Program. Mary is a publishedpoet and author of Women Writing for (a) Change: A Guide for CreativeTransformation (Notre Dame: Sorin Press, 2009). In Consulting for (a) Change, Marybrings the art of writing and the practices of community to the work of organiza-tional well-being and social healing in business, political, medical and educationalsettings. Mary was a TEDx speaker in 2010, her topic: "Found: the Holy Grail ofOrganizational Wholeness."

Remembering "No Place for You, My Love” While SwimmingBy Mary Pierce Brosmer

Editorial (con’td from page 1)

in depth psychology? The motivations mightbe personal, spiritual, economic, academic,to be a better person, to save the world, ormany other reasons but whatever our moti-vations may be we must be clear aboutthem.

In this issue of Depth Insights, we areembarking on ground that is at once new andalso old to depth psychology. Everythingexists interrelated to other beings and otherobjects and these selected pieces of artwork,poetry, and essays offer you the reader theopportunity to make meaning from the inter-relationships between the different pieces. Inaddition, how might you be making meaningabout the motivations of the artist, poet, orauthor?

In what ways do you read a poem or essayor see a painting, photo, or any type of visualart and make meanings about the social loca-tions of the author or artist? Almost all of usdo make these leaps about who the authoror poet is, and it is usually subtle, beneaththe radar, lurking in our shadow, all the whilejust out of reach of our conscious mind.

This issue of Depth Insights has greatartwork, poems, and essays and I hope youfind them worth your while as you explorethe ways you make meaning out of them andwith them. You the reader are the co-creatorof each work as you engage it, work it, andlet it work you. May these offerings be justwhat you need in this moment and time.

Notes

Kovach, M. (2010). Indigenous Methodologies:Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts.[Kindle Edition].Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies:Research and indigenous peoples. New York, NY:Zed Books.

Jesse Masterson holds Masters degrees inCounselor Education, Divinity, and DepthPsychology and is a Ph.D. candidate in DepthPsychology: Community Psychology,Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology.He has extensive training in Satir FamilyTherapy, Buddhist Psychology, InterfaithSpirituality & Counseling, Euro Shamanic &Pagan practices, as a healer and as a mind-fulness/meditation instructor. Jesse is on theorganizational board of the DepthPsychology Alliance, co-editor of DepthInsights e-zine and is on the editorial boardfor Immanence: The Journal of AppliedMythology, Legend, and Folklore.

Winner in the "Conversations Between aPsychologist and a Poet” 2015 Poetry Contest sponsored by Depth Psychology Alliance, with judges

Brian Michael Tracy and Robert Romanyshyn

o e t ryP

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“By the time you are Real, most of yourhair has been loved off, and your eyesdrop out and you get loose in the jointsand very shabby. But these things don’tmatter at all, because once you are Real,you can’t be ugly, except to people whodon’t understand.” (Williams, 2005, p. 17)

From one vantage point, TheVelveteen Rabbit appears a tale

for children, a story that brings to mindbeloved toys and childhood dreams. Butif we shift our view just a bit, we can seethat the words hold truth and meaningfor children of all ages, young and young-at-heart. A further shift and an imagininginto these very words brings us to a placewhere the Velveteen Rabbit himself isable to explain the intricacies of Hillman’sarchetypal psychology. By gently holdingboth the children’s storybook and thestory of archetypal psychology side byside, we will consider the four aspects ofthis psychology, looking at each in turnthrough the eyes of the Velveteen Rabbit.

We will begin by imagining into thestory itself, engendering the toys andallowing ourselves to hear their voicesand feel their emotions. We will journeywith Rabbit as he experiences both thejoys and struggles of life, and begins tounderstand the value of these experi-ences. Finally, we will consider what itmeans to immerse ourselves in the expe-rience of soul-making, to be enchanted,to open ourselves to the multiplicity pres-ent in every moment.

My argument is simple: The story ofthe Velveteen Rabbit, when read fromthe imaginal and reflective perspective ofsoul, not only provides us with an oppor-tunity to observe a “deepening of eventsinto experiences” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvi),but also engages us, the readers, in thevery act of soul-making itself. As weconsider Rabbit’s transformation to“Real,” we, in turn, become a bit moreReal. Hillman (1972) shared with us that“what we hold close in our imaginalworld are not just images and ideas butliving bits of soul; when they are spoken,a bit of soul is carried with them (p. 182).Rabbit has spoken, he has told us his tale,and as Hillman observed, “When we tellour tales, we give away our souls” (p.182). It is this bit of soul, given to us by

the Velveteen Rabbit, that offers us theopportunity to become Real.

Archetypal Psychology and SoulBefore embarking on a quest to

explore what gives archetypal psychologyits distinct flavor, let us attempt to definethe psychology itself. In looking to theGreek roots of the word “psychology” wefind logos and psyche, speech and soul.The word “archetypal” offers a multitudeof potential meanings, but for thepurposes of this paper, Hillman’s (1977)musings seem best suited: He noted thatarchetypal “rather than pointing at some-thing, points to something, and this isvalue.” When we look at an image froman archetypal perspective, “we ennobleor empower the image with the widest,richest, and deepest possible signifi-cance” (p. 82). Speech, soul, value, image,significance: These words fall together forme in a way that asks me to considerarchetypal psychology as a way of inter-acting with the soul that honors its wayof speaking, that recognizes the value andsignificance held within the images itshares.

This viewpoint urges me to considerthe word “soul,” and ponder how it isseen in this psychology that places suchimportance upon it. Hillman (1975)stated, “By soul I mean, first of all, aperspective rather than a substance, aviewpoint towards things rather than athing itself. This perspective is reflective;it mediates events and makes differencesbetween ourselves and everything thathappens” (p. xvi). He continued, “By ‘soul’I mean the imaginative possibility in ournatures, the experiencing through reflec-tive speculation, dream, image, andfantasy—that mode which recognizes all

realities as primarily symbolic ormetaphorical” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii).Depth psychologist Glen Slater noted thatin Hillman’s work “The driving concern isfor apt perspective—insight that satisfiesthrough its very way of seeing, so thatthe process of being psychological,referred to by him as soul-making,becomes the focus” (as cited in Hillman,2005, p. x). I continue to see the multi-plicity. Seeing soul as a thing, as aninternal guiding force, provides an easierhandle to grasp when first encounteringthe word and concept. It is here I beginwith others. I am then able to movebeyond, to sink into soul, to explore theconnection that unites my being with allthat surrounds me—a recognition of theanima mundi that shares my spark.Holding this allows me to reflect from anew perspective, to reach the placewhere soul and soul-making merge asone and experience and reflectiondeepen to a way of being.

Personifying, or Imagining ThingsThe first element of archetypal

psychology we shall explore is that of“personifying,” or imagining things.Hillman (1975) defined personifying as“the spontaneous experiencing, envision-ing and speaking of the configurations ofexistence as psychic presences” (p. 12).He saw it as “a way of being in the worldand experiencing the world as a psycho-logical field, where persons are givenwith events, so that events are experi-ences that touch us, move us, appeal tous” (Hillman, 1975, p. 13). A sign of thisimagining is the use of capital letters, for“words with capital letters are chargedwith affect, they jump out of theirsentences and become images” (Hillman,1975, p. 14). Personifying is what makesthe story of the Velveteen Rabbit someaningful: Rabbit and Skin Horse arenot mere toys tossed upon the nurseryfloor, waiting to be picked up and givenlife. They have their own essence thatdoes rely on another, that has no needfor human contact to be brought intoexistence. We can see the spirit of thisimagining into on multiple levels whenwe consider “becoming Real.”

First, there is the word itself: “Real.”Just as in Jungian psychology there is adifference between the small “s” self and

Becoming RealSeeing Through the Eyes of the Velveteen Rabbit

By Marta Koonz

“We will journeywith Rabbit as he

experiences both thejoys and struggles oflife, and begins to

understand the value ofthese experiences”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 20159 <Back to TOC

the capitol “S” Self, we see “Real” distin-guished, set apart by its grown up firstletter. Hillman (1975) shared the Greekand Roman tradition of “personifyingsuch psychic powers as Fame, Insolence,Night, Ugliness, Timing, Hope, to namebut a few,” a practice that recognizedpersonifying as a “necessary mode ofunderstanding the world and being in it”(p. 13). This “act of ensouling” paidhomage to these powers, recognizingthem as spirits that, if ignored, couldmanifest themselves in very tangibleways. Such is the case with Real, for inneglecting this powerful entity, we openourselves up to its disappointment.

Just what is Real? We find its rootsin nursery magic, “strange and wonder-ful,” and only understood by “thoseplaythings that are old and wise andexperienced like the Skin Horse”(Williams, 2005, p. 11). The Skin Horsetells us that “Real isn’t how you aremade, it’s a thing that happens to you.When a child loves you for a long, longtime, not just to play with you, butREALLY loves you, then you become Real”(Williams, 2005, p. 11). We sense theconnection here with Eros, with Loveitself. We feel the story of Eros andPsyche, linking heart and soul, loving andsoul-making. Indeed, Hillman (1975)stated that personifying “offers anotheravenue of loving, of imagining things in apersonal form so that we can find accessto them with our hearts” (Hillman, p. 14).He further mused, “Perhaps the lovingcomes first. Perhaps only through love isit possible to recognize the person of thesoul” (Hillman, 1975, p. 44). Thus the loveof the Boy and the soul of the Rabbitunite, Eros and Psyche joined, imaginedinto being.

Pathologizing, or Falling ApartThe journey of becoming Real

begins with the falling apart that is thehallmark of pathologizing. Hillman (1975)defined pathologizing as “the psyche’sautonomous ability to create illness,morbidity, disorder, abnormality, andsuffering in any aspect of its behavior andto experience and imagine life throughthis deformed and afflicted perspective”(p. 57). “By the time you are real, most ofyour hair has been loved off, and youreyes drop out and you get loose in thejoints and very shabby” (Williams, 2005,p. 17); you suffer, you discover shortcom-ings, you experience loss. Falling apart isnot for the faint of heart, for it is not aneasy journey.

“ ‘It doesn’t happen all at once,”said the Skin Horse, Rabbit’s wise old

guide. “You become. It takes a long time.That’s why it doesn’t happen often topeople who break easily, or have sharpedges, or who have to be carefully kept’ ”(Williams, 2005, p. 16). Hillman (1975)pointed out that there is necessity in thetravails of becoming, noting that “thesoul can exist without its therapists butnot without its afflictions” (p. 71). Alllearning involves an element of challenge,the learning of our authentic self most ofall.

It is the struggle that adds the rich-ness. Yes, the “idea of growing shabbyand losing your eyes and whiskers israther sad”, and we might find ourselveswishing that we could become real “with-out these uncomfortable thingshappening” Williams, 2005, p. 19). Butthese uncomfortable things are preciselywhat are needed, for they are the ingre-dients necessary to spur the meaningfulreflection that leads to soul-making.Rabbit himself “found it uncomfortable,for the boy hugged him very tight, andsometimes he rolled over on him, andsometimes he pushed him so far underthe pillow that the he could scarcelybreathe” (Williams, 2005, p. 22).

Hillman (1975) reminded us that“the dimension of soul is depth (notbreadth or height) and the dimension ofour soul travel is downward” (p. xvii),thus we see how the pushing under playsa vital role, how events that leave us“wet through with the dew and quiteearthy from diving into the burrows”(Williams, 2005, p. 27) provide us withthe grist needed to turn the wheel. Weare able to bear our “beautiful velveteenfur getting shabbier and shabbier, andour tails becoming unsewn, and all thepink rubbed off our noses,” (Williams,2005, p. 25), for this is an undoing, and“the undoing always becomes an open-ing. The result is a different perspective,one that deepens before it explains”(Slater, as cited in Hillman, 2005, p. ix).Becoming unsewn, illness, getting shab-bier, suffering—these are the openingthat lead to a new way of seeing, a waythat digs down into our being before

meaning is made.

Psychologizing, or Seeing ThroughIt is in the psychologizing that we

begin to see the glimmers that makesense of a life that has left us, like theSkin Horse, with “a brown coat that isbald in patches and showed the seamsunderneath,” and with “most of the hairsin our tails having been pulled out tostring bead necklaces” (Williams, 2005, p.10). Hillman described his seeing throughas having two interconnected parts:action and idea. “On the one hand,psychologizing. . . is an action. The soul’sfirst habitual activity is reflection. . . andreflection by means of ideas is an activity;idea-forming and idea-using are actions”(1975, pp. 116-117). But more thanaction alone, psychologizing also has aneed for ideas, for “action always enactsan idea; psychological ideas do notoppose action; rather they enhance it bymaking behavior of any kind a significantembodiment of soul” (Hillman, 1975, p.117). Thus we see that action and ideahave a senex/puer relationship—thesenex being the archetypal sage, philoso-pher or “old man,” while the puer is theeternal youth. Much like the senex, anidea “consolidates, grounds, and disci-plines,” while action, puer-like in nature,“flashes with insight and thrives onfantasy and creativity” (Slater, as cited inHillman, 2005, p. xi). Psychologizing, withits dance of reflection, with its focus onideas, acts as guide in our-soul-making.

The reflective speculation that liveswithin psychologizing urges us to lookthrough the lens of What? instead of the“philosophical Why? Or the practicalHow?” It is this shift that makes all thedifference, for it is “psychologizing’swhat—dissolving first into ‘Which?’. . . and then ultimately into ‘Who’”(Hillman, 1975, p. 139) that leads usdownward into soul. When all ourwhiskers are “loved off,” and the “pinklining to our ears turns grey, and ourbrown spots fade” (Williams, 2005, p. 50)we serve Psyche by asking, ”What ishidden within this loss?” or “Which partof me is experiencing this as hurtful? Or“Who in me worries that my whiskers areno more?” (Hillman, 1975, p. 139).

It is this style of questioning that“implies that everything everywhere is amatter for the psyche, matters to it—issignificant, offers a spark, releases orfeeds soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. 138).When we are led to ask, “Who in mefeels ‘very insignificant and common-place’ “ (Williams, 2005, p. 9), we probethe gash that life has slashed within us, a

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Becoming Real

“All learning involvesan element of

challenge, the learningof our authentic self

most of all”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 10

move that invites Psyche to enter. It isthis invitation, humbly offered, thatallows our “open wounds” to “begin toscar over with the skin of reflectiveengagement” (Slater, as cited in Hillman,2005, p. xvii). We gain a new perspective:we see differently. “By seeing differently,we do differently” (Hillman, 1975, p.122). We are different, we become Real.

This new perspective, this ability tofind meaning in loss and suffering, inchallenge and difference, is not alwayseasy to come by. The question, “How doyou help the person be with their afflic-tion, to hold it differently?” (G. Slater,personal communication, Nov. 16, 2013),might best be answered by turning tomyth. “Myths talk to psyche in its ownlanguage; they speak emotionally,dramatically, sensuously, fantastically”(Hillman, 1975, p. 154). This commonlanguage may well help us “lean into thesuffering” and find the meaning that lieswithin.

“’Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.”Yes, often times it does, but, as the SkinHorse reminded us, “When you are Realyou don’t mind being hurt”’ (Williams,2005, p. 15). When we are able to seethrough the struggle, to imagine into thesuffering, we don’t mind the pain. Mythspeaks a language that invites us toengage in “reflective speculation”(Hillman, 1975, p. xvi). “Myths do not tellus how. They simply give the invisiblebackground which starts us imagining,questioning, going deeper” (Hillman,1975, p. 158). They bring us to a place ofpossibilities, they nudge us to explore andhonor our personal story.

Dehumanizing, or Soul-MakingHillman (1975) stated that “There is

no place without Gods and no activitythat does not enact them. Every fantasy,every experience has its archetypalreason. There is nothing that does notbelong to one God or another” (p. 169). Itis this perspective that marks soul-makingas its own, a perspective that points tothe significance and meaning in thatwhich Psyche offers. Dehumanizing is a“gods-saturated way of interacting withthe soul (Koonz, 2013, n.p.), an approachthat “starts and stays with the soul’snative polycentricity,” that “keeps inmind the governance of the Gods”(Hillman, 1975, p. 167). In taking thispolytheistic approach, “we enter a styleof consciousness where psychology andreligion are not defined against eachother so that they may more easilybecome each other” (Hillman, 1975, p.168).

Again we see a senex/puer relation-ship, with the “tradition, stasis, structure,and authority” of religion interfacing withthe “immediacy, wandering, invention,and idealism” (Slater, as cited in Hillman,2005, p. xi) of psychology, of depthpsychology, of psyche. Hillman noted thatwhile “religion approaches Gods withritual, prayer, sacrifice, worship, creed,”in archetypal psychology the “Gods areimagined. They are approached throughpsychological methods of personifying,pathologizing, and psychologizing”(Hillman, 1975, p. 170).

Archetypal psychology is a psychol-ogy that honors the imaginal “speech ofthe soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. 119), thatpays heed to its images, and thus givescredence to the multiple Gods within.“When we imagine there’s a God in everywound, we hold the wound differently”(G. Slater, personal communication, Nov.16, 2013). Dehumanizing demands we dojust that; it requires that we imagine thepotentiality of Gods, the multiple voiceswithin the single experience.

Another vantage point that may betaken in our exploration of soul-making isthat of “enchantment,” which Slater(personal communication, Nov. 16, 2013)put forth as another form of dehumaniz-ing. Moore (1996) writes that“enchantment is a spell that comes overus, an aura of fantasy and emotion thatcan settle on the heart and either disturbit or send it into rapture and reverie.” (p.ix)

We can image that the variouspossibilities that emerge to sway theheart may have been sparked by one godor another, “by some haunting quality inthe world or by a spirit or voice speakingfrom deep within a thing, or place, orperson” (p. ix). Enchantment bids us totake up an imaginal perspective, toconsider possibilities not grounded in theliteral. It is “often colored by at least softhues of absurdity, which is only a sign ofits saving distance form excessive ration-

ality” (Moore, 1996, p. xi). Enchantment,or soul-making, plumbs the “mysteriousdepths of the heart of imagination wherewe find value, love, and union with theworld around us” (Moore, 1996, p. x). Itencourages us to become Real.

As the story of the Velveteen Rabbitnears its end, Rabbit finds himself castout of the nursery, alone and seeminglydestined for the burn pile. He wondered,“Of what use was it to be loved and loseone’s beauty and become Real if it allended like this? As he reflected, as hestruggled to see through his anguish, “atear, a real tear, trickled down his littleshabby velvet nose and fell to theground” (Williams, 2005, p. 66). This tear,this “aura of emotion that settled in hisheart” (Moore, 1996, p. ix), opened hisexperience to the imaginal realm. Hillman(1975) shared that “emotion is a gift thatcomes by surprise, a mythic statement; Itannounces a movement in soul” (Hillman,1975, p. 177). It is this gift, this move-ment in soul, that enriches Rabbit’s myth,for “where the tear had fallen a flowergrew out of the ground, a mysteriousflower, not at all like any that grew in thegarden. . . and presently the blossomopened, and out of it there stepped afairy” (Williams, 2005, p. 67).

What goddess might have sprungforth at this enchanted moment? PerhapsAthena, goddess of wisdom and purity,come to save one so pure at heart? Ormaybe we find Artemis, lady of the wild,here to rescue this creature so sacred toher? Or is it potentially Psyche herself,come to the aid of this being who hasgone through so much in her name?Whatever goddess or spirit it is present inthe flower recognizes the value and loveto be found within Rabbit’s heart, and ishere to “take him away with her andturns him into Real. . . Real not just to theBoy. . . but to every one (Williams, 2005,p. 70-71). This is the experience of soul-making.

Becoming RealAnd so our story comes to an end,

this myth we have shared now rests. Wehave heard from Rabbit, pondered hiswords and imagined into his struggles.We have set his joys and challenges sideby side with the major aspects of arche-typal psychology, using them to bringclarity to the speech of the soul set forthwithin. I, for one, have become a bitmore Real in the process, have immersedmyself in the soul-making that this reflec-tive experience offers. I now give to you abit of my soul, offered through thesepages, to hold close in your imaginal

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Marta Koonz

“I now give to you abit of my soul, offeredthrough these pages, to

hold close in yourimaginal world, joinedwith the bit of soulalready given by theVelveteen Rabbit”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201511 <Back to TOC

world, joined with the bit of soul already given by theVelveteen Rabbit. May they settle in your heart as youbecome a bit more Real.

References

Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis. Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press.Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York, NY:Harper.Hillman, J. (1977). An inquiry into image. Spring, 1977, 62-88.Hillman, J. (2005). Introduction. In G. Slater (Ed.), Senex andpuer (pp. iv-xxvii). Putnam, CT: Spring Publications.Koonz, M. (2013, October 28). God of Betweens. Messageposted to Pacifica Graduate Institute Course DJA 730DesireToLearn site.Moore, T. (1996). The Re-enchantment of everyday life. NewYork, NY: HarperCollins.Williams, M. (2005). The velveteen rabbit. Deerfield Beach,FL: Health Communications.

Marta Koonz is a professional coach and facilitator, focusingon career coaching from a depth psychological perspectiveand Jungian typology. She has an M.A. from PacificaGraduate Institute (Depth Psychology, with a focus in Jungian& Archetypal Studies). She specializes in designing and facili-tating engaging learning opportunities for groups.

Becoming Real

Received Honorable Mention in the "Conversations Between aPsychologist and a Poet” 2015

Poetry Contestsponsored by Depth Psychology Alliance, with judges Brian Michael Tracy and

Robert Romanyshyn

Beyondwhat hadbeenthe timeof becoming,a whisperkissedthe fallenpetals

Doo-Lalley Home

oe t r yP

Bonnie Pfeiffer is a Voice Dialogue Teacher/Facilitator,Dream Pattern Analyst, and SoulCollage© Facilitator, inaddition to being a Lover of Poetry.

P

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 12<Back to TOC

I am going doo-lalley: I dry feral wings,dance rings on the sand, spiral my name in heatherand bones. My mother sky-dreams me,feather-glances my hand to proclaim that she sees.

Blue-green moonstones stream over my head.Spear my heart, marine tears of childhood,unshed. Bumblebees honey-stick shells to mysoles, ground me with lungwort and bluebells,wood marigolds. Music surrounds me

wherever I hover, as I go doo-lalley.

Am going doo-lalley; I lend seagull a quill.He dipped in the rain and waits by my sill befriendingthe moon, lasers into my brain calligraphy script,

unlocks gates to her phases.

Rock and roll with bay lobsters, darethem to stay. Soon two acquiesce, fallinto my soul, crawl under my armpit.Sobbing loud while they tickle, I bless hewho derides my hysterical wonder,proud secret we share in the tides of Doo-lalley.

Going doo-lalley, I’m hoarding birdsongs in bloom,recording each tune on my tongue, raven-arcing themdeep in my womb. Press my navel! They’re sungwith the sweep of a lark, and I’ll croon along.

Did you question my song? That’s okay,I remember my grandfather needing to humevery day. He’d fought in the trenches;numb, he thought he’s explode

birds hid long in his bellyquenching his words, then dismemberedtogether, rode doo-lally home.

Doo -lalley, I am going! Stuff hair shafts with sea-weed, a slippery crown, curls twistneat on my sun-grafted skull, birth mantle of air,fontanelle mist as gentle as down, rough pearls in my ears. Bleed me lips with the tearsgone before, wad my feet full of clayfrom the core of the earth. Belay well.

Child of the sea, I’ll follow the sails,hand in fin with a cod, who’ll deliver melate while the wild horses foam, coolin the shallows, they’ll shiver me homeacross great lands of snow. Doo-lalley slow.

Roz Bound is a writer and a healer living in Prince EdwardCounty, Canada, where she has facilitated monthly OpenFloor gatherings for local writers since 2001, offers writingworkshops in her island home, and creates rituals that cele-brate the wheel of the year, stressing the vital importanceof myth, healing, and creativity—not only for today, but forour conscious evolution into an uncertain future. Rozreceived a BA in Human Services from the University ofAlabama in 1997, winning the Honour Award for her Seniorthesis, a memoir. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing atGoddard College in Vermont and is currently workingtowards a D.Min in Wisdom Spiritualities with the WisdomSchool of Graduate Studies, writing her Doctoral disserta-tion on aging consciously. She was a teacher of adults andchildren, and lived and worked in the Caribbean and SouthAmerica.

Roz’s first poetry collection was Spirit of Lyme, (2003), nowin its third printing, written during a year’s retreat by thesea in England after she retired from Seneca College. Hersecond book is The Fireman’s Child (2012). Her poems andprose have been published in books and magazines inCanada, including “A Room of Her Own” in the UnitedStates, and England, and she writes the editorial for a quar-terly newsletter published in Glastonbury, England, whereshe returns every year to work and give workshops at theGoddess Conference, now in its 19th year. Roz has spokenoften in Ontario, Alberta, and England on creativity, spiritu-ality and the strength of the human spirit.

Received Honorable Mention in the"Conversations Between aPsychologist and a Poet”

2015 Poetry Contestsponsored by Depth Psychology Alliance, with judges Brian Michael Tracy and

Robert Romanyshyn

Doo-Lalley HomeBy Roz Bound

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Some say that when the fairy folkruled Ireland, they had a well

beneath the sea where the nine hazeltrees of wisdom grew. At the given hourthese nine trees would blossom and fruitand drop their nuts onto the surface ofthe water, where five salmon waited toeat them. The nuts contained all wisdom,poetic inspiration, and the gift of secondsight. Whoever caught one of thesesalmon and ate the first three bites of itsflesh would acquire this wisdom andbecome a great poet.

Every creative enterprise unfolds inaccord with the image that guides it.Sometimes the image is given with theprocess but it can also be chosen, andattention to the operative metaphorsenhances the collaboration with theunseen sought by every artist and poet.My exploration of this relationship beganwith James Hillman’s suggestion that we“entertain” ideas. For years, I’ve begunmost creative projects by imaginingmyself straightening up my house, settingup a tea table with fresh flowers, andpatiently waiting (well, sometimes) by theopen door for an idea or two to arrive.These guests are vaguely imagined inhuman form, like Greek Muses. They areinvariably courteous and well dressed,but lately my dates for coffee or a latenight scotch (only with the most compati-ble) have been replaced with the imageof fish and fishing found in the Celticstory “Finn and the Salmon ofKnowledge.”

The image of the fish as the embodi-ment of vital, living contents of thepsyche has a long mythological history,and the metaphor of fishing is often usedto describe the search for inspiration.Arlo Guthrie said, “Songwriting is like fish-ing in a stream; you put in your line andhope you catch something,”—so stayupstream from Bob Dylan1. In fairy tales,fishing signals a waiting readiness forsomething to happen. Robert Bly writesthat, “Fishing is a kind of dreaming indaylight, a longing for what is below.”2

What takes the bait will be a catalyst for

transformation.Fishing requires patience and recep-

tivity, two qualities that are indispensableto any creative encounter, and it involveswater, the origin of life and archetypalSource, or what Gretel Ehrlich calls the“creative swill.” Water, she writes,“carries, weightlessly, the imponderablethings in our lives: death and creation.”3

The language of fishing also provides anumber of provocative metaphors:tackle, cast, troll, lure, snag, plumb,wade, and flounder, for example.

But as any skilled fisher personknows, the object is not merely to catchfish, but to catch the right fish, the big orwily fish, or the right kind of fish. Fishthat are too small or otherwise inappro-priate get released and thrown back.Finn, the druid poet and fisherman in thestory, was a man in search of deepknowledge. He studied the ancient loreabout the hazels, the salmon, and thegifts of wisdom and poetic inspiration. Hewas fishing for the Salmon of Knowledge.

Salmon are distinguished from mostother fish by their ability to live in freshand salt water. They are born in freshwater rivers and streams and make theirway to the sea. Salmon return to theirfreshwater birthplace to spawn after oneto five years of swimming in the openocean. The majority of them die in theprocess. The tenacity they display in thisendeavor, and their astonishing accuracyin locating the place of their birth, mayremind us that the creative act is alwaysan act of remembrance and that memoryis instinctual, especially memories of ourbeginnings.

The particular salmon in Finn’s story

lived in a deep pool overhung with treesin a curve of the Boyne River. Finn tracksthe fish to this spot and he spends sevenyears trying to catch it. The image of thesolitary poet evokes the combination offocus, stillness, and relaxed alertness thatcharacterize much creative work. Finn ismethodical, purposeful, and watchful. Hedevotes all of his energies to this task,even lives on the riverbank, because heknows of a prophecy that a man namedFinn will eat this very fish.

With every failed attempt he learnsmore about this fish and his desire for it.The attitude of active waiting extends tothe salmon, who we sense drawing nearaccording to the logic of instinctualmemory. The salmon took the nut whenit fell into the water. He will take thehook too, when the right moment arrivesto surrender his gifts. It’s merely a matterof time and patient effort.

At last Finn catches the fish.Feverish with anticipation, he builds a fireand puts the salmon on the spit. Thecooking has to be exactly right. The firehas to be the right temperature and thefish has to be turned at the right speed.Everything is going perfectly when Finnnotices that the coals are beginning toburn a bit low. But the salmon is notdone. Now what? He is out of dry sticksbut if he leaves the fish to gather morewood it will burn on one side and theSalmon of Knowledge will be ruined.

At that moment, a young manwanders onto the riverbank. He is soentranced by the beauty of the place thathe doesn’t notice the man by his fire untilFinn calls to him. “Boy,” Finn says, “I amso glad to see you. You’ve come at justthe right time. I have a beautiful salmoncooking but I need more wood. I’ll giveyou a silver penny if you’ll come overhere and turn the spit.”

The young man was good heartedand immediately came to the fire. “Turnit just like this, “Finn told him, “Theconsequences of burning this salmonwould be terrible. I won’t be gone long,but you must look me in the eye and

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Fishing for the Salmonof Knowledge

By Catherine Svehla

“Every creative enterprise unfolds in

accord with the imagethat guides it”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 14<Back to TOC

swear by all that’s true that you will noteat one morsel of the salmon while I’mgone. ”

The young man made the oath andFinn left to gather wood. The youngman sat by the fire and carefully turnedthe spit. But the sound of the birds andthe light on the water called to him andhis attention drifted away from his taskfor a minute or two. He stopped turningthe fish. When he realized his error, itwas too late. There was a blister thesize of this thumb on the underside ofthe fish. He started to turn the spitfaster but of course, this did no good.So he tried to flatten the blistered skinwith his thumb. The skin broke andthree red-hot drops of fish oil fell ontohis thumb.

Now, the young man is also namedFinn, and when he puts his burningfinger into his mouth he receives thewisdom and poetic inspiration from thesalmon. When the other Finn returnedwith an armful of wood and looked intothe young man’s eyes, he immediatelyknew that fate had intervened. Onlydestiny could explain the beautifullysimple confluence of right place, righttime, and simple accident for Finn thepoet, Finn the younger (Mac Cumhaillto be precise), and the fish.

If you identify with Finn the poet,this is a challenging moment. You maydecide that “fishing for the Salmon ofKnowledge” is not your image of choicefor the creative process. If you see your-self as the young Finn, you may bedoing a little jig. Which Finn are you?Finn the poet, who loses the salmonafter seven years of dedicated effort?—or young Finn, who blunders into eatingthe first bite? The Finn who valuespoetic inspiration so much that hespends his life trying to acquire it—or

the Finn who is wandering aroundlistening to birdsong?

Good fishing is a blend of craft andserendipity, and there is only one Finnon the riverbank. Catching and eatingthe salmon belong together. So domethodical plans, accidents, and blun-ders, research and reverie, the focusedpursuit of the particular, aimlesswandering, and immersion in the multi-ple delights of the world. These are allaspects of the creative process. Whatunites them is the nature of theprocess—and the fish.

In time past, the Irish poets said,“Unless I had eaten the Salmon ofKnowledge I could not describe it.” Inhis movement from fresh water to saltysea, the salmon learns and adapts toworlds that differ in ways humans canscarcely imagine. The ocean brine pick-les or purifies. What fortitude orflexibility must be required to resistthese two effects? That ability oncepossessed, now lies dormant in ourcells. Having emerged from the magiccurrents of the world we can’t goback—not that far back. But we can casta line into the waters of imaginationand memory and catch an ancient fish.

References

1 Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting4th Edition, (New York: Da Capo Press,2003), 71.

2 Robert Bly and Marion Woodman, TheMaiden King: The Reunion of Masculineand Feminine, (New York: Henry Holtand Co, 1998), 8.

3 Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of OpenSpaces, (New York: Penguin Books,1985), 83.

Catherine Svehla, Ph.D. is an independent myth scholar, storyteller,and artist. She is the founder of MythicMojo, where she creates story-basedclasses and programs that demonstratethe relevance of mythology to contemporary life, and the host of Mythin the Mojave, a weekly online radioshow that airs on Radio Free JoshuaTree and reaches an international audience. Visit www.mythicmojo.comand www.mythinthemojave.com andfind Myth in the Mojave on Facebook.

Catherine Svehla

“In his movement from fresh water tosalty sea, the salmonlearns and adapts toworlds that differ inways humans canscarcely imagine”

ICE FISHINGBy Donna May

Past, present and futureSwim below the surfaceOf frozen waters – alive anddaring,Yearning to break free fromRock hard liquid,Resisting.

Pen moves faster than Censor,Tap, tap; tap, tap,And a hole emerges large enoughto drop a line through.

A nibble, a tug, andWe begin to reel inUnknown parts of Self,Alive and thriving,A kaleidoscope of remembering,Unique (like us).

We say to those beside us:“Look at what I have caught!”Memories, sparkling in sunlight;NOWs large finned Truths; andFuture’s pearls unfolding.

Later ‘round campfire’s lightWe partake of the body ofOur stories found,Communing with one anotherIn a sacred circleUnited,Accepting,Believing.

Donna May is a therapist, consultant,and educator offering consultations,groups, and workshops on how todiscover, deepen, and dedicate your-self more fully to Psyche's call. Find heron Facebook or atwww.psychescall.com

o e t ryP

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201515 <Back to TOC

As the Divine Feminine incarnatesin women today, She helps us

unleash our captive souls. We are begin-ning to see what healed and wholedwomen look like.

Toni Wolff, Carl Jung’s colleague,wrote about the need to add the fourfoldstructure of the feminine psyche to Jung’stheories of introversion/extraversion andthe four functions. A woman’s psyche, aswe all know, is different from a man’s,even when it is shaped by patriarchialtools like competition and ambition.Women, when free, are shaped toconstantly reach deeper, for soulful loveand wholeness, because soul is where wegive birth to Spirit.

A woman…is by nature conditionedby the soul and she is more consis-tent in that her spirit and hersexuality are coloured by thepsyche. Thus her consciousness ismore comprehensive but lessdefined. . . .

The elimination of the psychic factor(the feminine) from consciousnessnecessarily leads to exteriorizationand collectivization, for thepsyche/soul is the inner life and thebasis of individuality. In medievalmysticism the soul is the organ forthe experience of God and the ‘birthof God’; man thus reaches thecenter in himself and at the sametime in the ‘primal ground’. Themodern ‘mystical’ urge does notstrive for ‘soul’ but for ‘gnosis’, for‘superior knowledge’, and thusimitations of ‘eastern wisdom’ of allkinds are consequently in sway.

The ‘soul’, i.e. the psyche, is thefeminine principle, the principle ofrelated ness, while ‘logos’ abstractsand generalizes the individual.1

Toni Wolff envisioned the femalepsyche to consist of two pairs of oppo-sites, much like Jung’s theory ofpsychological functions. Viewed on across, vertically, one aspect is the Mother

and the opposite aspect is the Hetaira(companion/friend). Horizontally, theMedial Woman/Seer stands opposite theAmazon. These symbolize the femininegifts of the soul. It isn’t very differentfrom the energies of the Triple MoonGoddess as Maiden/Amazon,Mother/Lover/Queen and Crone/MedialWoman. Wolff felt that most women inher time could not integrate all fouraspects.

With the disappearance of theGoddess in Western religions (except forCatholicism), came a repression of thosesame soulful, feminine qualities that areso crucial to a fruitful life. Women havebeen disconnected from our own sourceof wisdom for centuries and now wehurry to become “Father’s Daughters,”willing daughters of the patriarchy, look-ing for our power in the Father’s world.

Without a soulful understanding oflife, though, we become cruel, greedy,aggressive, domineering, unfeeling, self-ish and lazy. Unfortunately, many aspectsof patriarchy have become soulless—justlook at the injustices and folly of ourmedia and our political and economicsystems. These are the engines of oursociety that have to be shut down, so wecan birth something new. Fortunately,just as we reached this point in ourhistory, things shifted and women beganto come into our own feminine powerand purpose. Women are reclaiming oursouls and our gifts from patriarchy’sgrasp. Women are becoming whole as wereclaim our souls.

As an astrologer, I look to the heav-ens to see what story it is telling us aboutour times. Of the many images we haveof our heavens, the one that speaks tome the most is the picture of Earthrise,that famous first sight of Earth takenfrom the Moon. The beauty of our homeplanet always brings tears to my eyes. Ihave come to understand that thispicture is an image of Wisdom: AWoman, clothed with the Sun, standingon the Moon, crowned with Stars.2

When we see the Earth this way, we seethe image of Earth as Anima Mundi—theWorld Soul, a living, conscious entity. TheEarth was alive once more in our collec-tive consciousness and out of thisawareness grew the Women’s SpiritualityMovement as well as the EnvironmentalMovement in the late 60s.

That photograph shifted our para-digm of life. Taken from theMoon—associated with the TripleGoddess—this photo of Mother Earthsank into our psyches and remindedwomen of who we used to be. Womenbegan to see ourselves in the heavensand remember our Goddess-given gifts.And so the Goddess returned.

As women come into wholeness, wediscover that each of the four archetypalfeminine powers become available to us.When patriarchy constrained women tolive out only certain roles, manifesting allfour energies was not easily accom-plished. But times have changed andmany women are capable of shifting fromone aspect of our knowing to another.We can be mother and lover/companionboth; just as we can be self-aware as wellas psychic. When women own all ofourselves, we become powerful.

When we belong to ourselves,women access our wisdom and can do alot to change our world.

One of the most primal ways wechange the world is through all our rela-tionships. As we stretch and grow, weencourage the people we love to do thesame. If a woman can find wholenesswithin, she creates a soulful atmosphere

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A Soul UnleashedThe Archetype of Partnership, Dangerous Beauty

and the Art of RelationshipBy Cathy Lynn Pagano

“We can be mother andlover/companion both;just as we can be

self-aware as well aspsychic. When women

own all of ourselves, webecome powerful”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 16<Back to TOC

of harmony and joy around her thatconstellates growth in others. As womenwho are in touch with our own souls, wecan go a long way in encouraging otherwomen, men and children to discovertheir own souls—their own inner life. Weall need someone to relate to so we cangrow into ourselves. A conscious partnermakes all the difference.

Dangerous Beauty, Libra and the Art ofRelationship

So let’s look at the archetype ofpartnership through the lens of the astro-logical sign of Libra as well as themarvelous movie Dangerous Beauty.

Whenever I want to know what’sreally going on in the world, I look to thesky before I look at the Internet. Not thatI believe that the stars determine ourfate. I do believe they reflect themoment. How we use that moment is upto our free will. So understandingheaven’s story helps me understandsomething about what’s going on in theworld and within people. It’s a moreorganic, symbolic understanding of lifethan other ways to organize knowledge.

As the planets move through oursolar system, sometimes certain signs areenergized and emphasized. In the pastfew years, relationship signs have beenenergized—especially Libra. And relation-ships are definitely being re-evaluatedand revamped, regenerated andrenewed. Overt prejudice against peopleof color, of alternative sexuality and ofwomen has gone public and we’re beingforced as a culture to examine theseunconscious prejudices. This is symbol-ized in the heavens in the past year bythe North Node of the Moon in Libra. TheNorth Node is the point that indicateswhere our collective will needs to befocused, where we have to grow—and inLibra, it’s about creating more fairnessand balance in our partnerships and rela-tionships, more give and take, morecompromise and artistry.

Libra symbolizes not only about theneed for partnership, but also the art ofpartnership. Ruled by the Goddess Venus,this sign is about the art of relationship aswell as the art of diplomacy. We can seethis being played out on the world stageover Iran’s nuclear program. During thenegotiations, the South Node of theMoon, what we have to leave behind togrow, is in Aries, the sign of the Warrior.

The warmongers are like squabbling chil-dren—or unconscious lovers. Diplomacymeans that adults are settling issues in aresponsible and fair way.

Diplomacy is also a great tool in anyrelationship. I believe women are oftenbetter qualified at diplomacy in ourpersonal relationships because of ournatural ability to be inclusive. And thatmeans remembering our role in the rela-tionship dance. In our hurry to claimequal rights with men, women have lostsome of our instinctual feminine knowl-edge, especially the art of attracting,charming and seducing our partners. Asthe heroine of our movie is taught,

…you need to understand men. Nomatter their shape or size... position orwealth... they all dream of the temptress.The irresistible... unapproachable Venus.3

If this is still true, women need tounderstand and be responsible for thatpower we have. Good partnerships needour willingness to try to meet eachother’s needs as long as it doesn’t dimin-ish us, because each relationship needsthe give and take, the action and attrac-tion that is energized by both masculineand feminine energies, within bothstraight and gay couples. Whether wepursue or are pursued, the need toattract a mate calls for some artistry.

Libra rules all kinds of artistry. An airsign, Libra wants to put into action therules of engagement. Since relationshipmores are changing rapidly, here aresome of the feminine characteristics thatattract and engage men and womenalike. While women can be as honest,loyal, courteous, honorable and trustwor-thy as any man, we also know how tomake those shining virtues enjoyable andattractive.

Aphrodite: Goddess of Sacred Sex, Loveand Wisdom

And so we turn to Aphrodite/Venusto teach us those skills of love andconnection. Aphrodite is a Goddess ofWholeness, containing both masculineand feminine energies, and yet she is alsoa female being and manifests the femi-nine virtues when in relationship. Venusis called the ruler the sign of Libra inOctober, the harvest time, the time ofcommunity and fruitfulness, when thereis a balance between light and dark,between masculine and feminine. Shelends her special gifts to these social rela-tionships; not just love relationships butthe whole sphere of proper relationshipsbetween all peoples and nations. And soShe rules diplomacy and all forms of art.She asks each of us to examine whatBeauty and Truth mean to us and then toconsciously live it out. The Goddess ofBeauty, Love and Wisdom sits in theheart center of the body, ready tobecome the balance point in relationship.

Aphrodite of the Greeks, Venus ofthe Romans, is one of the most vibrantarchetypal images of the Goddess thathas come down to us from antiquity; theaspect of the ancient Goddess that wasnever totally forgotten, the form of theGoddess written about and romanticizeddown through the ages until She trulyembodied ‘the mystery of life, and lovethat begets life’.

Aphrodite is the Goddess whocombines the spiritual and naturalworlds, spirit and body. She does thisthrough Her essence, which is Love. Sheembodies the cosmic energy of connec-tion and attraction, for She bringseverything into relationship, from elec-trons to people. She is the Goddess ofLove, the love that is rooted in the bodyand which is playful, sensual, and erotic.As Goddess of Sexuality, she engendersall physically passionate love: non-maritaland marital, heterosexual and homosex-ual. As Goddess of Beauty, she connectsus to Truth. As Goddess of Wholeness,she drives our individuation and awakensPsyche/Soul within us.

The Greeks came to regard the idealform of Aphrodite’s divinity in the beautyof Her naked body, for ancient statues ofHer show Her either about to undress -revealing Her mystery - or alreadyundressed. If these forms express Her

Cathy Lynn Pagano

“Diplomacy is also agreat tool in any

relationship. I believewomen are oftenbetter qualified atdiplomacy in our

personal relationshipsbecause of our naturalability to be inclusive”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201517 <Back to TOC

essence, then it is the realm of body thatreveals Her mystery. There is a radiantcharm in Her loveliness which draws usinto relationship, because the truth ofHer Being is embodied. As the archetypalessence of love and sexuality, Her heav-enly nature clothes Her instinctual, earthynature, thereby uniting both realms inharmony. She asks us to love our bodies,knowing that they are truly the temple ofSpirit here on Earth.

Aphrodite is so powerful becauseShe connects us to our deepest yearningsand desires, those very instincts anddesires which we have tried to control orrepress for fear of patriarchy’s rules. Wefear our bodies as much as we fear death,and so we do not give ourselves over tolove completely. Very often our sexualdesires and fantasies symbolize our deepneed for union with the Divine. And if welet it, our deep union with the Divine canopen us to our senses so that our sexual-ity becomes holy. When we cut ourselvesoff from the deep soul connection oursexuality needs, we also cut ourselves offfrom a basic connection to the Spirit. Inreclaiming our sexuality, we come thatmuch closer to Spirit.

We have to remember that theChristian Church, from its earliest begin-nings, viewed sex as inherently evil. Theearly Church fathers felt that chastity wasthe only means of finding sanctity, andmany of them were obsessed with thenotion that sexuality was the cause of ourfall into original sin. Medieval theolo-gians felt that sex caused the damnationof the human race, and that women,being the cause of carnal lust, were soul-less and the ultimate source ofdamnation! They, however, rarely blamedmen for being unable to restrain them-selves from raping and pillaging womenand children.

The Church set out to destroypaganism, which included fertility rites,and the cults of the ancient Goddess,which viewed sexuality, as well aswomen, with reverence and honor, Andso women were seen as the source of allevil. The Church condemned Eve as thesource of our fall from grace when shetaught Adam about sex. The Protestantswere even worse in their view of sexual-ity and women, for they preached thatmen should beat their wives and not takepleasure in the sexual act.

The Church’s legacy of sexual inhibi-

tions and repression gave rise to thesexual revolution in the ’60’s, and we arestill dealing with inappropriate sexualityin terms of sexual permissiveness andout-of-control pornography. When wereact to something, we are still bound toit. It is only when we really free ourselvesfrom the old that we can find a newbalance.4

A New Relationship with Sexuality

As we said in the beginning of thisessay, women are moved by our souls.And as women become whole, we wantto engage in a sacred sexuality. For toolong it has not been so, and we are stillexperiencing the dysfunction of oursexual history. We need to heal our sexu-ality. In Raine Eisler’s book, SacredPleasure; Sex, Myth and the Politics of theBody5, she says that it is important tounderstand how the way society usespain or pleasure to motivate humanbehavior determines how it evolves. Ourtraditional Christian imagery sacralizespain rather than pleasure, especially inchoosing Christ Crucified rather than theRisen Christ as their central God-image.Women’s bodies and sexuality have beendemonized by Christianity and thereforerigidly controlled. And so, we have a soci-ety where there is mistrust between menand women because of this longstandingreligious mistrust and control over oursexual relationships.

Aphrodite emerges from the searadiant in her feminine sexuality. Shedoes not need a lover, whether man orwoman, to awaken or confirm this knowl-edge for her. She owns her body andknows she is a sexual being. Aphrodite isopposed to those thinkers who would doaway with the bodily differences thathave kept women second-class citizensfor millennia; who would say there is noinherent difference between women andmen. Politically and economically menand women must be equal. But our

equality cannot be based on sameness,for it does away with the unique visionand understanding of life that manifeststhrough our bodily differences. Ourequality should be based on the fact ofour differences, for we are created maleand female.

The Taoist concept of Yin and Yangspeaks of how these two primal energiesintermingle in all of creation, how each ofus contain both male and female. Thetwo sexes are miraculous and mysterious.To disregard our bodily differences doesaway with a consciousness of images, forour bodies image femininity andmasculinity in the world. We need to getbeyond the stereotypes to the reality ofour bodies, and when we do, we willbegin to understand the mysteries theymanifest.

Aphrodite loves our differences, forShe is the dynamic that connects theopposites and brings about transforma-tion. In ancient Greece, she was pairedwith Ares, the god of war, just as theywere known in Rome as Venus and Mars.Love and War. Make love, not war. Andperhaps the most true - only love cancontain war. Only love knows how to takethe war out of men, only love andcompassion can give rise to true peace.

Aphrodite’s love for Ares is long-standing; even when her husbandHephaestus traps them in an unbreakablechain as they lie in bed together,Aphrodite feels no shame. Perhaps inclaiming a connection to the warriorenergy of Ares, who as the Roman Marswas concerned with grappling hand tohand with an opponent, Aphrodite showsus that it takes the courage and passionof a warrior to engage in sexual love,because it is through our sexuality thatwe open ourselves to the Other and grap-ple with that Other. When we connect onthe most basic levels, in the battlefield oflove, we learn that sometimes surrendercan be more pleasurable and ecstaticthan victory. Yet in surrendering to loveand passion, we open to the ‘Unknown’—we come to know and appreciate‘Otherness’. It is through love that westretch ourselves and become somethingmore, do something more.

Veronica Franco: The ArchetypalWhole Woman

Aphrodite’s companions are the

<Back to TOC

A Soul Unleashed

“Aphrodite loves ourdifferences, for She is

the dynamic thatconnects the opposites

and brings about transformation”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 18<Back to TOC

Muses of music, dance and poetry. Hersacred priestesses were skilled not only inthe arts of sexual love but in all the artsthat make for civilization – writing,poetry, history, philosophy, music, artand dance. Knowledge and creativity inthe Arts can also teach the art of livingand loving.

Throughout the ages, the Courtesanexemplified this ideal woman: a womanwho enjoyed her sexuality, who wasknown for her intelligence and who wasskilled in the arts. There is a beautiful1998 movie about the famous Venetiancourtesan and poetess, Veronica Franco,called Dangerous Beauty. This film is atribute to Aphrodite and the courtesansof Europe, who inspired and createdmuch of Western art, literature andculture since the Renaissance.

In ancient times, when the patri-archy was just gaining power and thereligion of the Goddess and her relation-ship to fertility and sexuality was stillconsciously valued, there were sacredprostitutes, tantric priestesses of theGoddess, who would make love to menas a sacred act of worship, a way ofconnecting men to the power of theGoddess. As the patriarchy took overpower from the earlier matriarchy, menstill recognized and honored the power ofthese sacred prostitutes, and there werestill priestesses who performed the hierosgamos, or sacred marriage, of the King tothe land and the Goddess.

These women later became thecourtesans of ancient Greece. Courtesansenjoyed great personal freedom andeconomic power, while the wives andfemale children of men were oftentreated little better than slaves. Thesehetaira, called ‘companions to men’ werenot viewed as common prostitutes, butwere often in the center of the politicaland as well as the social life of Athens, aswere her later counterparts in Venice andParis. The most famous woman in 5th

Century Athens was the hetaira, Aspasia,who lived with the great Athenian politi-cal leader, Pericles. Plutarch claimed thatAspasia was clever and politically astute,and noted that Socrates would bring hisstudents to hear her speak, for she was ateacher of rhetoric, even though she alsoran a school for courtesans.6

During the Renaissance, the courte-sans of Venice, called Honest Courtesans,were as famous for their literary talents

as for their sexual artistry, and for thenext few centuries, courtesans enjoyedmore power and independence – espe-cially economic freedom - than any otherwomen in Western Europe. The courte-sans of Europe have left their mark onour architectural, literary and artisticheritage.

The courtesan became the idealincarnation of the Goddess Aphrodite, awoman who belonged to herself, whooften enjoyed the same freedom andsocial benefits as men, who was the intel-lectual equal of men, and who was asadept at the arts of music, poetry anddance as she was at the art of lovemak-ing. While the courtesan’s place andpower depended on powerful men’sneed for female companionship, theCourtesan certainly is the exemplar of thepowerful influence an independentwoman can have on men if we own ourwholeness.

Susan Griffin, in her book The Bookof the Courtesans7 enumerates thevirtues of these courtesans: Timing,Beauty, Cheek, Brilliance, Gaiety, Graceand Charm. We modern women couldlearn a lot about getting men to valueand complement our standpoint if wepracticed these ancient arts.

Veronica Franco knew how to usethese feminine virtues. Trained as a cour-tesan by her mother, who was also afamous courtesan, Veronica quicklybecame a favorite of the power elite inVenice. From an ancient, yet impover-ished, Venetian family, Veronica wasskilled in all the arts of the courtesans,for Venice was famous throughoutEurope for her courtesans. Her literaryskills were enjoyed and supported by the

rulers of Venice, and at one point, shehelped Venice attain the support of theFrench king in their war with theOttoman Empire. But when the plagueswept through Venice, the Churchblamed it on the licentiousness of thecourtesans and had many of them brutal-ized. Veronica was charged withwitchcraft, but she saved herself bystanding up for herself and shaming thenoble men who had used her for theirown pleasure and yet were quick toabandon her in her trouble. The characterof Veronica Franc is the most completeand whole female character in any movieI’ve ever seen.

Dangerous Beauty is a story aboutVeronica’s rise to fame, as well as herenduring love for a powerful Venetiannoble, Marco Venier (a moody RufusSewell). When Veronica (an amazinglyartful Catherine McCormack) learns thatMarco cannot marry her because he mustmarry for wealth and power, her motherPaola (the beautiful Jacqueline Bisset)encourages her to become a courtesan.We are invited into the mystery school ofthe courtesan as Veronica is taught thearts of the courtesan in a most informa-tive and delightful way. The power of thecourtesan is that she can be educated,unlike the proper noble wives of Venice,who are left ignorant of both history aswell as current events. Veronica’s friendBeatrice, sister of Marco, has to askVeronica to come and tell the properladies of Venice how their husbands fareduring the war, for as Beatrice says, theyare totally inconsequential to their men.

The beauty of Veronica’s characteris that she has all the virtues of thenoblemen of her time, and yet shedisplays them through her femininity.While she is wildly in love with Marco,once she becomes a courtesan she valuesherself enough not to sleep with him ifshe can’t marry him, and she enjoys – yestotally enjoys – the sex with other men.Her wit and her charm, her intelligenceand poetry, make her a favorite at court.She is not afraid to stand up for herself,even dueling to defend her honor whenshe has a nasty altercation with Marco’smean-spirited, jealous, drunk cousin,Maffio (a deliciously evil Oliver Platt).

After seeing her hurt by Maffio,Marco goes to her. Once Veronica andMarco are together, she willingly gives upeverything to go away with him, against

Cathy Lynn Pagano

“Veronica was charged with witchcraft,but she saved herselfby standing up for

herself and shaming thenoble men who had

used her for their ownpleasure and yet werequick to abandon her

in her trouble”

her mother’s advice to never love any ofthe men she takes to her bed. Marcodeclares nothing can separate them. Thatis, until Venice needs Veronica to seducethe French King and get his help in theirwar. When she does, she wins their acco-lades but loses Marco.

The writers are brilliant in theirdepiction of how these noblemen canpraise Veronica for her wit and poetry,enjoy her beautiful body and admire herspirit, and yet abandon her when itmatters most, calling her a ‘whore’ who’llfuck anyone for money. Marco is nobetter. He thinks of only his pain, hispossessive love. He refuses to see thatVeronica had no choice to go to theFrench king if Venice was to be helped.

The men of Venice go off to fightthe Ottoman emperor (with the Frenchking’s help), but return from war to find acompletely transformed Venice. Theplague has decimated the city and fanati-cal preachers assure the people that it isGod’s vengeance on them for their frivo-lous and licentious ways. Courtesans arebeaten and killed.

Veronica is imprisoned and accusedof witchcraft by Maffio, who has alwaysbeen jealous of her beauty and power.Marco wants her to plead guilty so shecan confess and be absolved of her ‘sins’but she refuses because that will meanshe has to deny who and what she is.Once again, Marco thinks only of his painif she dies, although later he chooses todie with her if need be.

Her ‘confession’ to the Church courtbeautifully expresses the feminine stand-point that has been so denigrated byChristianity and patriarchy.

Veronica Franco: I confess that as ayoung girl I loved a man who wouldnot marry me for want of a dowry. Iconfess I had a mother who taughtme a different way of life, one I resis-ted at first but learned to embrace. Iconfess I became a courtesan, tradedyearning for power, welcomed manyrather than be owned by one. Iconfess I embraced a whore’s free-dom over a wife’s obedience. Iconfess I find more ecstasy in passionthan in prayer. Such passion isprayer. I confess I pray still to feelthe touch of my lover’s lips. Hishands upon me, his arms enfoldingme... Such surrender has been mine.I confess I pray still to be filled and

enflamed. To melt into the dream ofus, beyond this troubled place, towhere we are not even ourselves. Toknow that always, this is mine. If thishad not been mine-if I had lived anyother way-a child to her husband’swill, my soul hardened from lack oftouch and lack of love... I confesssuch endless days and nights wouldbe a punishment far greater than youcould ever mete out. You, all of you,you who hunger so for what I giveyet cannot bear to see that kind ofpower in a woman. You call God’sgreatest gift- ourselves, our yearning,our need to love - you call it filth andsin and heresy... I repent there wasno other way open to me. I do notrepent my life.

Blessings! I love that speech. Andyet, how many women today would thinkto say those things. We are so concernedwith making our way in the world – themasculine world of commerce – thatmost of us don’t value our relationshipsas much as our jobs. We no longerbelieve that relationships are central toour lives because we’ve bought into thepatriarchal paradigm that power andmoney are more important than love andcommitment.

This is not about going back to theold paradigm of patriarchal relationshipsand family values. Rather, it is aboutenhancing our relationships, which iswhat courtesans excelled at. Women arethe heart and soul of relationships and ifwomen polish up our feminine virtues –our courtesan nature – we can createvibrant, loving, creative partnerships. LikeVeronica, women must own our sexuality,sharpen our wits, open our hearts andlisten to our Wisdom.

Women can find our wholenesswhen our sexuality is as full and as deepas our minds have become. The centuries

of shame and sin that Christianity hasprojected onto sexuality must be healedand transformed, for sexuality cannot beanything other than spiritual when itbecomes the union of body and spirit.Before we can engage in true unionbetween two people, we must first bringabout a union of body and spirit withinourselves. We must be somebody if weare to love somebody. Aphrodite can leadus to this kind of feminine individuation.

Now, men have their own initiationand their own gifts to add to relation-ships. If I may drop a hint: Women lovewhen men are self-aware, strong,committed, empowered, courteous, sexy,intelligent, passionate, creative and fun.But that’s a story for another day.

References

1 Wolff, Toni, Structural Forms of theFeminine Psyche. Privately printed for theStudents Association, C.G. Jung InstituteZurich, July 1956. Pp. 1 -2,4.2 Pagano, Cathy, Wisdom’s Daughters: HowWomen Can Change the World.(Bloomington, IN: Balboa Press, 2013.) Thisis a symbolic study of the figure of LadyWisdom as ‘the Woman clothed with theSun’, who comes to birth a new world.3 Dangerous Beauty, 1998, WarnerBrothers Films.4 Pagano, Wisdom’s Daughters5 Eisler, Raine, Sacred Pleasure; Sex, Mythand the Politics of the Body. (New York:HarperCollins Pub. 1995).6 Pagano, Wisdom’s Daughters.7 Griffin, Susan, The Book of theCourtesans. (New York: Broadway Books,2001).

Cathy Lynn Pagano, M.A. is a certifiedCore Energy Life Coach as well as aJungian-trained psychotherapist,astrologer, storyteller and Wisdom coach.She has worked with the tools of theImagination for over 30 years. She is theauthor of Wisdom’s Daughters: HowWomen Can Change the World, andStories of the Earth, a book of spiritualtales of the 8 Gateways of the Wheel ofthe Year.Cathy is an ordained priestess of theGoddess Sekhmet, as well as an interna-tionally known astrologer. She writesbi-monthly newsletters on the archetypalmeaning of the New and Full Moonscalled The Cosmic Story and is the resi-dent astrologer on Karen Tate’s Voices ofthe Sacred Feminine radio show.

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201519 <Back to TOC

A Soul Unleashed

<Back to TOC

“He thinks of only hispain, his possessive

love. He refuses to seethat Veronica had nochoice to go to theFrench king if Venicewas to be helped”

P

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 20<Back to TOC

To imagine the impossible is deeply human.To re-member every thing is alive, dreaming, intelligent,coming for youto ravish you awakeis your inheritance.

To muster the heart to stretch to the edge of what beckons you is your ticket to ride.This is what you are for.

Your cellular capacity to imagine —unbound —is a subversive technology,alteringevery thingthrough an evolutionary, fractal spin, juicy withelemental creativity.Dangerous.This is what you are for.

Let your self be claimedby darkly-feathered unchained hands,servants on a mission,come to take youhard down to the wet cavesof what flushes your delicate skin,dampens your palms,wakes you like a raging dreaminto shimmering forcesunknown.

WHAT YOU ARE FORby Melissa La Flamme

About the poemWhat You Are For is an invitation to a modern-day vision quest, visionary poetry thatbeckons a healing journey into the depths and heights of individuation. Offered up tosimultaneously ravish and soothe the tender, broken-open heart, this piece was writ-ten as medicine for the soul. Intentionally crafted to open the doors of perceptionand deliver the reader into her or his delicious potential, What You Are For engagesthe reader in the central conversation of this life. All at once an encounter, lovely,heart-pounding, yummy and sensual, raw and erotic, heart-opening and heart-break-ing, wrapped warmly in comforting, healing love. This poem is primal, poetic medicinefor the 21st century soul.

This poem has been called "a shaman’s brew of poetic ayahuasca." A vine of soul, ofdeath, of new life. To sit with these poetic lines and the power of the word is in itselfa breaking open of our egos, their compromises and identifications which bind us andhold us back. This is a new kind of poetry, medicine for the soul. Here we haveshamanic poetry at its best, at its freshest, a post-modern poetry that unites the oldinitiatory shamanic themes.

Melissa La Flamme, M.A. is a visionary artisan of cultural evolution, author, poet, shamanic guide and teacher,Jungian psychotherapist, depth psychologist and trouble-maker. Melissa is a graduate ofPacifica Graduate institute inCarpinteria, California. She lives in Denver, Colorado and servessouls—humans and other-than-humans—worldwide.Find her online at www.jungian-soulwork.com and on Facebook atwww.facebook.com/MelissaALaFlamme.

Here, you will knowyou have no choice.Finallyfree,you submitto the way that has called youbefore speech.This is what you are for.

Let this Trouble take youto your knees.With your sweaty, full attention, wrapped in the limbs of the sacred,kissthe plump, pink lipsof your tender soul.But wait. This is not about you.You are being used.By every thing.This is what you are for.

Now, draw into your beingthe throb of the one way of belonging that is yours to make matter.This is what you are for.

The broken-hearted,glistening hum ofyour taut, tangledbody will giveoff a fragrant, unrulyintelligence beyond the Machine's measureof right, wrong, reason.This is what you are for.

Have you come here to make Troublefor Assurances and Security? For Greed and Convention?For Routine and Predictability?For Comfort?Good. Those are the Killers of what you are for.

The planet iserupting withUncomfortable.The earth is writhing in pain.Feel her suffering in your blood, yourbowels, andyou will know what you are for.Taste compassion for the sacrificed, the slaughtered andyou will love like the Milky Way.

Shatter your old ways, andshow me how your soul blushesalive with arousal.This is what you are for.

Be an unpopular harbinger, an endangered one;a tender, firmly sproutedsentinel ofthe rhizome of archaic revival.

Do not take a seat.She is ready for you.The soul of the world will see you now.

What have you come to give her?

o e t r yP

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201521 <Back to TOC

Kintsugi 1by Debra Goldman

mixed media on board, 12"x9", 2014

Kintsugi 2by Debra Goldman

acrylic paint & encaustic on board, 24"x18", 2015

“I am an American-born artist and a mother of two children.

Of equal importance to these two significant aspects of myself I also have anongoing commitment to working and witnessing in creative ceremony and ritual,in mentoring women in workshops that include Story, Art and Transformationand in living on a small organic farm in the Pacific Northwest.

This current work explores ideas of planetary healing through the metaphoricalprocess of Kintsugi, the art of golden repair.”

Find Debra’s work at www.DebraGoldmanStudio.com

Art from Debra Goldman

Debra writes:

Debra’s image, Recordar, "topass back through the heart", isfeatured on our cover this issueas well as fragments next to thetitles of each of our essays.

About Recordar: encaustic painton board, 16"x12", 2014

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 22<Back to TOC

Scholarship does not know defini-tively what the spirals at

Ireland’s most famous tomb and monu-ment—New Grange, meant to the Celtsor their forbearers.

They remain a mystery.Scholars remain on the outside of

this mystery, studying the facts.Is there a way into this 5000 year-

old mystery, into an experience of thismystery?

Inspiration!Its very sound has a compelling pull

on me.I hear my breath expel softly as the

word is spoken. Its sound conveys breath-ing—mostly breath, with no hardconsonant “stops”.

So much like “whisper”.I look up its meaning although I

already know that “spire” means tobreathe. This word also has two othermeanings: a single turn of a spiral and atapering, rising to a point, like a churchspire. All three meanings, of breath,spiral, and tapering, are now independentof one another in our daily usage. Buttheir sounds echo with one another—an

echo of the past?This preliminary “word work”

already triggers a memory.Spirals and vortices have frequently

appeared in my dreams over the years.Part of my subsequent research took meto the Celtic world where spirals ofcourse play a prominent role. I learnedthat Celtic scholarship could not discoverany definitive meaning for the manyspirallic forms found on Celtic artifacts.While engaged in this research, I remem-ber seeing an ancient rock carvingdepicting human figures with spiralsemanating from their mouths! I saw it, Iswear, yet to this day I cannot find anyreference to it in the archeological world.I am left with an intriguing hint frommemory that spirals and speech belongtogether, somehow.

But the archeological world ofburied facts is not the only “portal” toour spiritual heritage—our dead past. Ourspiritual heritage is also buried deepwithin our language, yes, as the past, butthat past still living within our language,or as language’s very within-ness.

I return to my word work.In our modern language, as stan-

dardized by the dictionary, “spire” has

three separate meanings, each seeminglyunrelated to the others—all hiddenwithin the word “inspiration”.

Breathing seems so unrelated tospiraling and tapering.

I decide to dig more deeply into theliving history of meanings residing in oureveryday use of words. A spire, as oneturn of a spiral, arises from spira, whichmeans, “to coil.” A coil is a connectedseries of spirals, as in a coil of rope. “Coil”comes from colligere, Latin for “collect”.This makes sense since a coil, in collectingspires together, becomes a coil in the firstplace.

But then a surprise!The word “collect”, as I said, arises

from the Latin colligere and this wordemerges in turn from the etymologicalroot, leg-, which, as well as meaning tocollect and gather, as in the Latin legere,from which one meaning of religion isderived—a sacred gathering, has a deriv-ative meaning of “to speak”, or logos,with an inflection in meaning of speakingenchanted words.

So, I now find buried within theword “inspiration” meanings of “breath”,“sacred gatherings”, “enchanted speech”,“spirals”, and “tapering to a point”, as ina church steeple.

I have at last penetrated the histori-cal depths of language to the forgottenpsyche, the ancient living past, as recon-structed in modern consciousness, and animage is thus released!

The magnificent ruins of NewGrange now appear before my eyes. I seea mouth, from which emanates a collec-tion of spirallic forms, directed perhaps toa sacred gathering below, radiatingoutwards from the center, like a sector ofa circle.

Now from the listener’s standpoint,I see a rising and tapering to a point, tothe place where enchanted, inspiredspeech emanates from the high prieststanding at the mouth of the cave:priest—the cave’s chosen mouthpiece,inspired to speak the cave’s spirallicwisdom out to the people waiting below.

New GrangeThe Mystery of Speech

By John Woodcock

New Grange (c 1880): public domain

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201523 <Back to TOC

New Grange, magnificent ruin of along-gone culture, now lies mute, as itsformer mystery is appropriated to theneeds of a growing tourist industry.

But the real New Grange still lives,yes, still “out there” in the real world, asthe real world—its very Being. But it toolies mute—mute for thousands of years.It needs its modern priests, its mouth-pieces, in order to speak. It speaks inspirals, vortices. What would such speechsound like, and where would its meaningtake us if we spoke its turnings as theycoil around us?

What would it say, in saying throughus, its mouthpieces, after so many millen-nia of silence?

John C. Woodcock currently lives with hiswife Anita in Sydney, where he teaches,writes, and consults with others concern-ing their own journey, in hiscapacity as aJungian psychotherapist.

John Woodcock

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 24<Back to TOC

Introduction

The study of dream interpretationhas been a subject debated throughouthistory and continues to this day to holda fascination not only for those involvedin the world of psychology, medicine, reli-gion and philosophy, but also to otherswho merely wish to gain a greater insightinto their own psyche through the studyof their dreams. As the pioneer of dream-work within a psychoanalytic framework,Freud’s theories were revolutionary andhis original ideas are still relevant today.Many have followed Freud and expandedon his pioneering work, making furthercontributions to the theories of dreamanalysis, the most notable being CarlJung. Hence this work commences withan overview of Freud’s theories prior tohis association and collaboration withJung, whom he viewed as his successor. Itcontinues to explore the relationship anddifferences between Freud and Jung,leading to the break in their association,followed by an exploration of Jungiantheory in relation to dreams. An overviewof some post-Jungian concepts precedesa brief conclusion to this article.

Freud as the pioneer of dream inter-pretation

Freud developed his pioneeringwork with dreams over a period of years,renowned for his statement that theinterpretation of dreams is ‘the royalroad to knowledge of the unconsciousactivities of the mind’.1 Following Freud’sfather’s death in 1896, his self-analysisled to increased concern with dream-interpretation and the way in which hetreated his patients2. Freud worked onthe general assumption that dreams arenot a matter of chance but associatedwith conscious thoughts and problems.Appearing to be split off areas of theconscious mind, and based upon theconclusion of eminent neurologists, itwas believed that neurotic symptoms arerelated to some conscious experience.3

Thus, from Freud’s point of view,dreams look back retrospectively andcontain some indication of the causes ofneuroses and complexes, the complexbeing defined as a group of intercon-

nected ideas, both conscious and uncon-scious, which have a dynamic effect onour behaviour.4 We may further considerthat as dreams are such a commonphenomena, that interpretation may beone of the most useful methods by whichto work with the resistance of neuroticpatients.5

Freud’s ‘The Interpretation ofDreams’, (1900), is one of the mostimportant works of the 20th century ondream analysis and formed the basisfrom which others followed with furtherpsychoanalytic theories. His hypothesesare based on the understanding thatdreams are fulfilment of disguised orrepressed wishes that touch upon thedesires of infancy.6 It is argued that theproblematic of Freud’s proposition lies inFreud’s adherence to the view that alldreams are, in some way, fulfilment ofwishes, and ultimately, that this resultsfrom repressed or frustrated sexualdesires occasionally triggering nightmaresfrom surrounding anxieties.7

According to Freud’s original theo-ries, dreams have both a manifestcontent (as the dream is experienced,reported or recalled) and a latent orhidden content which may only berevealed by interpretation.8 Freudbelieved that dreams have an originaltext, which encounters censorship onpublication and needs to be redrafted ina way that the censor cannot understand.Thus the original draft is the latentcontent, the redrafting is the dream-work, and the final published draft is themanifest content.9 Freud’s wish fulfilmenttheory defines the latent content as awish fulfilled in hallucinatory form in thedream10, on which he comments;‘Dreams are things which get rid of

(psychical) stimuli disturbing sleep, by themethod of hallucinatory satisfaction.’11Illustrating this in a simple dream ofundisguised wish fulfilment, Freuddiscusses a dream of his daughter, Anna,who at nineteen months, after a daywithout food following a stomach upset,dreamed of a menu with her own nameon it; ‘Anna F., stwawbewwies, wildstwawbewwies, omblet, pudden!’ Anna’sstomach upset had been traced back tothe fruit which appeared twice in thedream, a reaction to a day of starvation.12

Translation into the manifestcontent is necessitated by both the physi-ological conditions of sleep, determiningthat dreaming is a visual process, andthat the wish is unacceptable to thewaking ego and needs to be disguised inorder to pass the censor. One may viewnightmares and anxiety dreams repre-senting failures in the dream-work wheretraumatic dreams, in which the dreammerely repeats the traumatic experience,are exceptions to the theory’.13 Freudproposed that dreams may be distortedand that in order to make an interpreta-tion, a contrast must be made betweenthe manifest and latent content of thedream, the only necessity being to takenotice of his theory which is not based onconsideration of the manifest but asreference to thoughts shown by interpre-tation.14

Freud initially saw the way to therepressed contents that the individualdoes not want to accept by use of thepatient’s free association with his dreamimages. It may be considered that freeassociation is the method by which avoice must be given to all thoughts with-out exception.15 When encouraged tocontinue talking, whilst lying on a consult-ing couch, with Freud sitting, unobservedbehind his patient, the thoughts whichemerged would eventually reveal theunconscious basis to his neurosis. Inorder to illustrate Freud’s way of working,in the case of the dream of a youngwoman suffering from agoraphobiaresulting from a fear of seduction, hispatient dreamed that she walked down astreet in summer wearing a straw hat of apeculiar shape with the middle-piecebent upwards and side pieces hangingdownwards so that one side was lower

“Many have followed Freudand expanded on his

pioneering work, makingfurther contributions to thetheories of dream analysis,

the most notable beingCarl Jung”

The Study of Dreams from Freud to Jung

By Elise Wardle

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201525 <Back to TOC

The Study of Dreams from Freud to Jung

than the other. Feeling cheerful andconfident, she passed a group of youngofficers thinking that none of them coulddo her any harm.16

Freud interprets to his patient, thehat as being symbolic of the male genitalorgan, with the middle-piece sticking upand the side-pieces hanging down. In hiscomments on his interpretation, Freudwrites; ‘....”Unter die Haube kommen”[“to find a husband” literally “to comeunder the cap”)]’.17 Freud intentionallydid not comment on the side-pieceshanging down unevenly, saying; ‘thoughit is precisely details of this kind thatpoint to an interpretation.’18 Freudinformed his patient that her husbandhad such fine genitals there was no needto be afraid of the officers as, owing toher fears, she did not go out unaccompa-nied. Freud’s patient then withdrew herdescription of the hat and denied havingsaid anything about the side-pieces butFreud was too certain of what he hadheard. After a pause, she enquiredwhether all men had testes where onehung down lower than the other as in thecase of her husband, thus confirming andaccepting Freud’s interpretation.19

As illustrated above, in discussingthe symbolism of dreams, Freud indicatesthe manifest content hides the latentsexual content that would not be mani-fest in such a way that the dream wouldseem acceptable to the ‘controlling’ or‘censoring’ Superego. Freud suggests thatsexual ideas may not be represented andare described as symbols, proposing thatas the dreamer is unaware of thesymbolic meaning, there is a difficulty inmaking a connection between the symboland what it represents, although stressesthe fact that the interpretation ofsymbols is important for the technique ofdream interpretation.20 Freud acknowl-edges a return to a technique used by theancients, where dream interpretationwas identical with interpretation bymeans of symbols.’21 For Freud symbolsinform us that parents may be repre-sented by Emperor and Empress or Kingand Queen; rooms represent women andopenings of the body and that the major-ity of symbols serve to represent peopleand erotic activities with male genitalsbeing representative of weapons, sticks,tree trunks and the like whilst femalegenitalia may be shown as cupboards,boxes, carriages or ovens.22

Freud denied any existence of atranscendent function in dreams main-taining that there are twocomplementary theses regarding thenature of dream-work in that the dream

is absolutely not creative and restrictedto the transformation of the material. Inaddition it is the dream-work... and notthe latent content, which constitutes theessence of the dream, warning analystsagainst excessive respect for a ‘mysteri-ous unconscious.’23 It was on the basis ofthese hypotheses that eventually aftertheir years of collaboration, Jung wouldcease his association with Freud topursue his own theories of analyticalpsychology.

Jung as Freud’s disciple

In December 1900, at the age oftwenty-five, Jung commenced his psychi-atric career at the Burghölzli LunaticAsylum in Zurich and had read Freud’sThe Interpretation of Dreams. Jung didnot grasp Freud’s theories until he stud-ied it further in 1903 when he discoveredhow closely it linked in with his own ideasand the concept of repression. In hisstudy of Freud’s work, Jung found thatthe concepts illuminated mysteries hefaced working with psychiatric patients inthat repression was a factor in psychosis,as in neurosis. In addition, delusionscould be also be analysed in the sameway as dreams.24 Jung could not agree,however, on the content of the repres-sion. Whereas Freud considered thecause to be sexual trauma, for Jung, sexu-ality played a less important part.25 Jungbelieved that individual developmentcould not merely be studied by any onegeneral principle i.e. sexuality and theconcept of wholeness was consistentwith individuation (discussed later) whichhe saw as the goal and end of psychiclife.26

After a period of correspondencebetween Freud and Jung, the two met forthe first time in 1907, their first conversa-tion lasting for a period of thirteen hours.Freud immediately saw Jung as his scien-tific “son and heir”27 and felt he hadfound his successor. Jung had experi-

enced his superior, Eugen Bleuler, at theasylum, as a father figure but as theirrelationship had deteriorated, one maypostulate that he was seeking a differentkind of father figure and being unable toconfide in Bleuler, gravitated towardsFreud.28 They shared a deep friendshipfrom the outset which lasted a number ofyears and although Jung’s doubts regard-ing Freud’s view on sexuality were inplace from the outset, they workedclosely together between 1907 and 1912,Jung working in a similar way until helater varied the way in which he prac-ticed. Jung, though impressed by Freud’ssexual theory, remained doubtful andquestioned whether Freud’s sexualtheory actually stemmed from Freud’sown subjective experiences.29

Jung doubted the importance Freudattached to dreams as the starting pointfor a process of “free association” andthat a patient’s complexes, may bediscovered in a variety of ways.According to Jung, “complexes” was theterm used by psychologists to describe;‘repressed emotional themes that cancause psychological disturbances.....orsymptoms of a neurosis.’30 Dreams,therefore, may have a far more importantrole, considering that more attentioncould be paid to the form and content,rather than allowing the discovery ofcomplexes which could be traced byother means. The development of Jung’sanalytical psychology focused his concen-tration on associations to the dream’smanifest content, in the belief that theunconscious was attempting to communi-cate something specific. In addition, thatwhich the unconscious was attempting tosay was not necessarily from anyconscious split-off problem or repressedexperience as Freud had believed. ForJung, mediation between the unconsciousand the conscious was a process offruition from the understanding of both.Although Jung did not deny that in theuse of “free association”, complexes maybe discovered which caused neuroses, hebelieved far more may be discoveredabout the psychic life-process of an indi-vidual’s whole personality and that thesymbolic images contained in his dreamshad, Jung said; ‘a more significant func-tion of their own’.31

Jung defined the dream as; ‘a spon-taneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form,of the actual situation in the uncon-scious,’32 seeing the relation of the dreamto consciousness as being compensatory.We may consider that in contrast toFreud, whom Jung felt looked at dreamsonly from a causal standpoint, for Jung

“In December 1900, atthe age of twenty-five,Jung commenced his

psychiatric career at theBurghölzli Lunatic Asylum

in Zurich and had read Freud’s The

Interpretation of Dreams”

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 26<Back to TOC

dreams are psychic products which maybe seen from either a causal or purpose-ful point of view. In simple terms, we maytake it that Freud worked in a reductiveway analysing dreams as ‘in the moment’,whereas Jung’s view maintained an inter-est in where his patient’s life was leadinghim, rather than a supposed root causeof symptoms.33

Jung as dissenter

In 1909 Jung was invited with Freudto lecture at Clark University in theUnited States. It was during the voyagethat in attempting an interpretation ofone of Freud’s dreams about his wife andsister-in-law, when asked what he associ-ated with the dream34, according to Jung‘Freud’s response to these words was acurious look – a look of the utmost suspi-cion. Then he said, “But I cannot risk myauthority!” At that moment he lost italtogether. That sentence burned itselfinto my memory; and in it the end of ourrelationship was already foreshad-owed.’35

During the same voyage, Jung andFreud seemed to contrast over the mean-ing of a significant dream of Jung’s, fromwhich Jung’s concept of the CollectiveUnconscious developed. If Freud hadfollowed Jung’s method of exploration,Jung said; ‘he would have heard a far-reaching story. But I am afraid he wouldhave dismissed it as a mere effort toescape from a problem that was really hisown.’ In Jung’s dream, he was on the firstfloor of his home in a sitting roomfurnished in the style of the 18th century.Going downstairs he found the groundfloor to be rather dark furnished in thestyle of the 16th century. Venturingfurther down to the cellar, a door openedonto stone steps leading to a largevaulted room consisting of stone slabsand ancient walls of Roman origin.Further steps led to a cave or prehistorictomb containing two skulls, bones andbroken pottery.

Jung relates the dream to asummary of his life and the developmentof his mind, the 200 year old house inwhich he grew up and his study of thegreat philosophers, following his livingwith the ‘still medieval concepts’ of hisparents.36 Jung describes the dream asthe house representing an image of thepsyche, the deeper he went, the morealien the scene, the primitive man withinhimself was discovered, an image whichcannot be illuminated by consciousness.37Freud’s interpretation was that secretdeath-wishes were contained within thedream which prompted Jung’s feeling of;

‘violent resistance to any such interpreta-tion.’38

The dream marked a turning pointin the relationship between Freud andJung, intensifying Jung’s interest inarchaeology, mythology and ancient reli-gion which became the starting point forhis book, The Psychology of theUnconscious, later published as Symbolsof Transformation. Jung knew, in publish-ing the book in 1912, that it would causethe final break with Freud and his depar-ture from the psychoanalytic movement.Its content rejected the Freudian view oflibido as sexual and argued that it is anon-specific psychic energy, with sexual-ity being only one form in which it maybe channelled. Jung also argued thatFreud’s theory on the Oedipus complexwas, in fact, not necessarily sexual,regarding any desires a son or daughtermay have for a parent, which are, ‘not asa search for a physical goal but as ameans to spiritual development.’39

A conversation took place betweenFreud and Jung in 1910 in Vienna whereJung recalled how Freud had said to him;‘Promise me never to abandon the sexualtheory’, continuing, ‘...we must make adogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.’ AsJung questioned him, Freud responded;‘A bulwark against the black tide ofmud.....of occultism.’40 Jung’s divergencefrom Freud’s views on religion, spiritualityand philosophy, at this point, promptedhis knowledge that he would never beable to accept Freud’s irreligiosity, believ-ing that Freud had; ‘constructed a dogma;or rather, in place of a jealous God whomhe had lost, he had substituted anothercompelling image, that of sexuality.’41Jung questioned whether Freud’s lack ofvision may have been altered if he, likeJung, had experienced some kind of innerexperience42. From the earliest dreamJung remembered at between three andfour years old, where; ‘I was initiated intothe secrets of the earth.....into the realm

of darkness’, the unconscious beginningof his intellectual life43 had prompted hislife-long search for truth.

Jung – as pioneer of analyticalpsychology

The investigation of the structureand function of the unconscious began inthe 1890’s, pioneered by Freud44 whoseoriginal thesis was later redefined byJung. Freud believed there were threelevels of consciousness including theconscious, of which we are aware, thepreconscious, retaining thoughts whichare retrievable and the unconscious,which is generally out of our awareness.Between 1894 and 1899, Freud’s own selfanalysis during a period of sufferingneurotic symptoms, led to the elabora-tion of the essential features ofpsychoanalytic theory. These included theconcepts of infantile sexuality, develop-ment of the libido, Oedipus andcastration complexes and dream theory.Later development in life was influencedby early fantasies, symptoms beingunderstood by realisations of repressedsexual wishes.45 Freud defined the struc-ture of the psyche as a dynamic systemcontaining the Id, the Ego and theSuperego, The Id forms our basic, instinc-tual drives, energies and unconscious; theEgo is the conscious part of personalitycontaining defences, repressed anddenied material; the Superego acts as the‘controlling watchman’, holding inter-nalised parental and cultural prohibitions.

In contrast to Freud, Jung’s model ofthe psyche ‘is of a dynamic self-regulatingsystem with its own energy calledlibido’46 containing both a personalunconscious and a collective unconscious,the Ego or the ‘I’ or ‘me’ being the focalpoint of consciousness.47 As bearer ofpersonality, it mediates between subjec-tive and objective experience, arising outof the Self during early development.Considered as subordinate, the Ego canalso express the Self.48 Jung’s model ofthe Self is the regulating centre of theentire psyche as a whole. The Self, as anarchetypal basis of the ego may appear inthe form of a mandala in a dream orvision, often a circle with a clear outlineand may contain a square with an obvi-ous centre. As the ‘Self’ may be referredto as the ‘central archetype or order’(discussed below), it may take the formof a symbol of higher value.49 The collec-tive unconscious contains within it ahistory of the human species, psychologi-cal DNA, in other words, the history ofhumanity from its inception.

For Jung, the personal unconscious

“Venturing further downto the cellar, a dooropened onto stonesteps leading to alarge vaulted roomconsist ing of stone

slabs and ancient wallsof Roman origin”

Elise Wardle

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201527 <Back to TOC

is made up of complexes, a group of ideasconnected by a shared emotional chargehaving a dynamic effect on consciousbehaviour. Freud’s conception ofcomplexes was that they were involvedwith illness, whereas Jung’s view was thatthey were an essential part of a healthymind. Contained within the collectiveunconscious are ‘components’ Jungtermed ‘archetypes’50 or archetypalimages. An archetype may be defined asa primordial image coming from phyloge-netic memory with a functioningrelationship existing between complexesand archetypes; complexes being under-stood as ‘personifications’ of archetypesand a means whereby archetypes mani-fest themselves in the personal psyche.’51Jung describes the archetype as;‘.....essentially an unconscious contentthat is altered by becoming conscious andby being perceived, and it takes its colourfrom the individual consciousness....’52

The anima, a dream figure of theopposite sex in a male, and the animus, inthe female, represent archetypal figuressymbolic of mother, father, Queen, King,religious figure, leader, wise man, trick-ster (as an archetype in the Shadow – seebelow), and so on. From this we maydeduce that Jung’s theory on symbolicrepresentation in dreams was highly incontrast to Freud’s view. Jung believedthat Freud did not work with symbols butsigns which refer to the known, whereassymbols point the way ahead.53 Theimage of a father or mother, or King andQueen, in a dream may represent apatient’s real father, but may also have aspiritual significance related to the DivineFather, or Divine Mother, Goddess orGreat Mother.

Another aspect or component of thepsyche is that which Jung termed ‘TheShadow’, containing the basic instinctswhich may be compared with Freud’sidea of the Id, and is regarded as part ofthe psyche containing the darker aspectsof the personality. Jung’s perspectivebecomes evident when one looks at hisdescription of the shadow which forFreud are in reality repressed contents.54The Shadow often appears in an image ofthe same sex and plays a leading role in adream.55 Jung, in describing his owndream recalls; ‘I was with an unknownbrown-skinned man, a savage...... I heardSiegfried’s horn and knew we had to killhim.... we shot at him, and he plungeddown, dead.’ In Jung’s understanding ofthe dream; ‘The small, brown-skinnedsavage who accompanied me and hadactually taken the initiative in the killingwas an embodiment of the primitive

shadow.’56The image of the person we present

to the outside world was termed by Jungas ‘the Persona’; in other words, themasks we wear in the world, a system ofadaptation, which is the form the person-ality takes in its social surroundings. Untilchallenged, it is easy to ignore just howmuch it has been identified with a role oran image.57

If one is to make a comparisonbetween Freud’s psychoanalytic interpre-tation of a dream and the way in which itmay be examined by Jung, an example isillustrated by John Sanford, who writesabout a client’s relationship with herhusband. Sanford’s client has a need tofulfil her own potential, or in Jungianterms, to ‘individuate’ (see below) and isheld back by the demands of her spouse.The dreamer, filled with hate, stands in aroom facing a door when a man enterswhom she knows but not in waking life.She shoots him as he enters and reachesout to her; she fires five more shots andkeeps pulling the trigger although he isdead she stands staring, hatred turning toexultation.58

In the dream she confronts some-thing that she hates and destroys. Freudmay interpret that the dream expressedhatred of her husband although not iden-tified as such, perhaps because thisthought would be objectionable to herSuperego. The manifest content indicatesan unknown man, but the latent meaningwould reveal the man to be her husband.

A Jungian would argue that a dreamconceals nothing, it is a product of natureand spirit and we must pay attention toexactly what the dream says. It was aman unknown to her when awake, nother husband, but representing somethingin herself of which she is consciouslyunaware. Unconscious feelings of hatredtowards her husband would haveportrayed him as the man in the dream.The fact that he is unknown to her maypose the question as to whether this man

is her own animus expressed negatively.59In Jungian terms, individuation may

be defined as becoming who we truly are‘warts and all’, total self-acceptance andintegration of all the different aspectstowards wholeness, the key concept ofJung’s theories. In other words, Jung’swork focused on an individual’s self-reali-sation, a spiritualistic and holisticapproach to psychotherapy and the heal-ing of the patient. In Jung’s own words;‘It (individuation) is as much one’s self,and all other selves, as the ego.Individuation does not shut one out fromthe world, but gathers the world to one’sself.’60 Freud stated early in his career;‘No doubt fate would find it easier than Ido to relieve you of your illness. But youwill be able to convince yourself thatmuch will be gained if we succeed intransforming your hysterical misery intocommon unhappiness.’61 Freud’s state-ment may indicate the absence of a morefar-reaching vision towards his patients’abilities to achieve wholeness. One maysay that where Freud worked with thosein the first half of life, Jung’s views onindividuation led him to work more withthose approaching the second half of lifeafter the formation of a strong ego. A‘mid-life crisis’ may trigger a need torelate to ‘the archetypal forces that liebehind both the collective culture andthe personal psyche’.62

Although Jung, as a scientist, wascriticized by some for his beliefs, whenexploring the dream images of hispatients fully, found references whichwere clearly metaphysical, often having a‘numinous’ content relating to higherconsciousness, or the ‘Divine’. In aidingthe healing process by leading his patientto ‘listen’ to the messages the uncon-scious was attempting to convey, apatient may be led to his own sense of‘Self’ in relation not only to his own indi-viduality but also his connection to andpart of a greater universal consciousness.Jung did not so much ‘interpret’ hispatient’s dreams, but rather by allowingthe patient to follow his own associationsto the dream images, found that an indi-vidual possessed his own ability to ‘goback into a dream’ to find out its mean-ing. Unlike Freud, who was not seen byhis patient, allowing no interference with‘free association’, Jung sat face to facewith his patient, establishing eye contactand building a therapeutic relationshipwithin a two-way dialogue. Jungproposed that; ‘...in any thoroughgoinganalysis the whole personality of bothpatient and doctor is called into play’,advising us that as therapists we must

“For Jung, the personalunconscious is made upof complexes, a group

of ideas connected by a shared

emotional charge having a dynamic effecton conscious behaviour”

The Study of Dreams from Freud to Jung

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 28<Back to TOC

always be aware of our own process inthe client/therapist relationship.63 Jungdiscusses his own dream after a feeling ofbeing unable to find the correct meaningof his patient’s dreams and a deteriora-tion in the relationship. Jung’s dreamshows his patient at the top of the high-est tower of a castle situated on a steephill and in order to see her, he had tobend his head far back. The dream indi-cated that in reality he had been ‘lookingdown on her’. The treatment movedforward following his understanding ofwhat was transpiring unconsciouslywithin the therapeutic relationship.64

Jung states in his last work ondreams and symbols, ‘There is no thera-peutic technique or doctrine that is ofgeneral application, since every case thatone receives for treatment is an individ-ual in a specific condition’65. Jungcontinues; ‘...60 years of practical experi-ence has taught me to consider each caseas a new one.........It all depends on learn-ing the language of the individual patientand following the gropings of his uncon-scious toward the light.’66

Post Jung – to present day

In his discussion on post-Jungiananalysts, Andrew Samuels points out thatthere is a dilemma between; ‘how tomove in the underworld and also keep aconnection to the personal life of thepatient in the day-world.’67 The dreammay be regarded as not only the ‘official’dream, but also whatever it may pull in towhat may surround it at the time, includ-ing relevance to the history of the patientand any subsequent events related to thedream.68

As a result of Samuel’s research, hesuggests that modifications have beenproposed in respect of Jung’s originaltheses. On looking at the importance ofthe dream ego, i.e. the dreamer’s behav-iour, Dieckmann comments that it isactually on a par with the waking ego andrather than fulfilling a wish or acting in acompensatory way, is merely expressingwhat is happening in waking life. Thebenefits gained clinically are the patient’sdiscoveries of previously unrecognisedqualities within dreams, often buildingthe initial bridge of the therapeutic rela-tionship as the patient is enabled to talkabout his dream experience.69

The importance of analysing thepatient and not the dream is stressed byLambert who comments that in asking fordreams, the natural flow or process ishalted thus not allowing the unconsciousto ‘speak’. The patient may feel obliged

to bring dream material or produce it as away of preventing the emergence ofdeeper feelings.70 In other words, infocusing purely on dream analysis, otherunderlying issues or mental health prob-lems may be missed altogether.

It is further argued by Hillman, thatthe dream may have its own purpose andneeds no translation. Dream images leadto the night-world or underworld i.e. thearchetypal layers of the psyche wherethere is no harmony between consciousand unconscious. For Hillman, eachdream is complete and needs nocompensation.71

Conclusion

There are many schools of thoughtrelating to dream-work which may leadus to question whether there is anycorrect way in which to approach it.What is clear is that dreams may beinvaluable as a clinically diagnostic aid,are useful in the treatment of neurosisand offer an understanding of any under-lying individuation process.72 Thus wemay view the dream as ‘reality’, whosenature is personal but obscure. Its’ mean-ing full of life but uncertain and only thedreamer may truly understand what hisdream is telling him. If we disregard thedream, it moves us in any case, workingits alchemical transformations in thedepths of the psyche, seeking the samegoal of individuation with or without ourconscious aid.73

Notes

1 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams(Second Part) and On Dreams, S.E. Vol. V,1900-1901, Translated and edited byJames Strachey in collaboration withAnna Freud, Institute of Psychoanalysis,1953, Vintage, 2001, London, p. 6082 Davis, A., Oedipus Redivivus, Freud,Jung and Psychoanalysis, HaverfordCollege, 1997,www.shrinkrapradio.com/2007/06/22/97-the freudjung-letters/

3 Jung, C.G., (Editor), Man and HisSymbols, 1964, Edited after his death byM.L.von Franz, Pan Books, 1978, London,p. 94 Rycroft, C., A Critical Dictionary ofPsychoanalysis, 1968, Penguin, 1995,London, p. 235 Freud, S., The Interpretation of DreamsS.E. Vol. IV, 1900, Translated and editedby James Strachey, 1953, Penguin Books,1991, London, p. 226 Freud Museum, Freud and Dreams(2008), www.freud.org.uk/Theory1.html7 Brians, P., Reading About The World,(2008) Vol.2, 3rd Ed, Harcourt BraceCollege Publishing in Sigmund Freud; TheInterpretation of Dreams (1900)www.wsu.edu;8080/~wldciv/world-civ-reader/world-civ-reader-2/freud.html8 Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary ofPsychoanalysis, p. 409 Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary ofPsychoanalysis, p. 9810 Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary ofPsychoanalysis, p. 4011 Freud, S., Introductory Lectures inPsychoanalysis, Lecture IX, TheCensorship of Dreams, S.E., 1920,Translated and edited by James Strachey,1963, W.W.Norton, New York, p. 16712 Freud, S., Introductory Lectures inPsychoanalysis, Lecture VIII, Children’sDreams, S.E.1920, Translated and editedby James Strachey, 1963, W.W.Norton,New York, p. 16213 Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary ofPsychoanalysis, pp. 40-4114 Freud, S., The Interpretation of DreamsS.E. Vol. IV, 1900, Translated and editedby James Strachey, 1953, Penguin Books,1991, London, p. 21515 Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.B., TheLanguage of Psychoanalysis, 1973,Karnac, 2006, London, p. 16916 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams(Second Part). pp. 360-36117 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams(Second Part). p. 36118 ibid19 ibid 20 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams(Second Part), p. 68321 ibid22 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams(Second Part) pp. 683-68423 Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.B., TheLanguage of Psychoanalysis, 1973,Karnac, 2006, London, p. 12524 Hayman, R., A Life of Jung, 1999,W.W.Norton, 2001, New York, p. 5725 Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams,Reflections, 1963, Recorded and edited

“A Jungian wouldargue that a dream

conceals nothing, it isa product of natureand spirit and wemust pay attentionto exactly what the

dream says”

Elise Wardle

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201529 <Back to TOC

by Aniela Jaffé, Fontana Press, 1995,London, p. 17026 Samuels, A., A Critical Dictionary ofJungian Analysis, 1986, Routledge &Kegan Paul, London, Shorter, B., Plant, F.,p. 13827 Binswanger, L., Sigmund Freud;Reminiscences of a Friendship, London,1957, pp. 10-11 in Hayman, R., A Life ofJung, 1999, p. 8828 Hayman, A Life of Jung, p. 8129 Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams,Reflections, 1963, Recorded and editedby Aniela Jaffé, Fontana Press, 1995,London, pp. 17230 Jung, C.G., (Editor), Man and HisSymbols, 1964, Edited after his death byM.L. von Franz, Pan Books, 1978, London,p. 1131 Jung, Man and His Symbols, pp. 11-1232 Jung, C.G., (CW 8, para. 505), inSamuels, A., A Critical Dictionary ofJungian Analysis, 1986, Routledge &Kegan Paul, London, Shorter, B., Plant, F.,p. 4833 Samuels & Shorter, A CriticalDictionary of Jungian Analysis, 1986,Routledge, Kegan Paul, London, Plant, F.,p. 4834 Hayman, R., A Life of Jung, 1999, W.W.Norton, 2001, New York, p. 11335 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 18236 Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 4337 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 18438 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 18339 Stevens, A., On Jung, 1990, Penguin,1991, London, pp. 22-2340 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 17341 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 17442 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 17643 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 26-3044 Stevens, A., On Jung, 1990, Penguin,1991, London, p. 1145 Stevens, On Jung, p. 1946 Astor, J., Michael Fordham,Innovations in Analytical Psychology,1995, Routledge, London, p. 23547 Stevens, On Jung, p. 3048 ibid49 Hall, J.A., Jungian DreamInterpretation, Inter City Books, 1983,Toronto, pp. 10-1150 Stevens, On Jung, 1990, Penguin,1991, London, p. 28

51 ibid52 Jung, C.G., Four ArchetypesMother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster,Translation by R.F.C. Hull, 1969, BollingenFoundation, Princeton University Press,1992, Princeton, N.J., p. 553 Samuels, A., Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985, Brunner Routledge, 2004,E. Sussex, p. 23054 Humbert, E.G., C.G. Jung, TheFundamentals of Theory and Practice,translated by Ronald G. Jalbert, 1984,Chiron Publications, 1988, Illinois, p. 48 55 ibid56 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,pp. 204-20557 Humbert, C.G. Jung, The Fundamentalsof Theory and Practice, p. 5158 Sanford, J. A., Dreams and Healing,1978, Paulist Press, New Jersey, p. 14459 Sanford, J.A., Dreams and Healing, pp.145-14660 Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams,Reflections, p. 41561 Freud, S. & Breuer, J., Studies onHysteria, 1893-1895, translated by Jamesand Alix Strachey, S.E. Vol. II, 1955, ©Angela Richards and The Institute ofPsychoanalysis, Pelican, 1974, Penguin,Middx., p. 39362 Hall, J.A., Jungian DreamInterpretation, Inter City Books, 1983,Toronto, p.1463 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,pp. 154-15564 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,

pp. 155-15665 Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 5466 Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 5567 Samuels, A., Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985, Brunner Routledge, 2004,E. Sussex, p. 23968 ibid69 Dieckmann, H., ‘On the Methodologyof dream interpretation’, in Methods ofTreatment in Analytical Psychology, 1980,ed. Baker, I., Bonz, Fellbach, in Samuels,A., Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985,Brunner Routledge, 2004, E. Sussex, p.23570 Lambert, K., Analysis, Repair andIndividuation, Academic Press, 1981,London, in Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians, p. 23671 Hillman, J., The Dream and theUnderworld, Harper & Row, 1979, NewYork in Samuels, A., Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985, Brunner Routledge, 2004,E. Sussex, p. 23872 Hall, J.A., Jungian DreamInterpretation, Inter City Books, 1983,Toronto, p. 11673 Hall, Jungian Dream Interpretation, p.117

In private practice as a JungianPsychotherapist, Elise Wardle gained herMasters Degree with Middlesex Universityin 2009 and has since qualified asCounselling Supervisor, Hypnotherapistand as an accredited member of the BACP(British Association for Counselling andPsychotherapy).

The Study of Dreams from Freud to Jung

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 30<Back to TOC

WHY NOSTALGIA STINGS LIKE A MOTHERBy W. P. Basil

How deep will you go, said the ancient but wise one, nostalgia being Greek for pain from an old wound. Keep calm and soldier on, you said on too many occasions. You didn’t want me to be your private fail or another hit and run away. Could you be any more unconscious?

I wonder, could you be any more endearing too, with your toes like baby shrimp, nostrils that finds chaos so appealing to the senses, with ears for not listening?Your words, like your hair, don’t care where they land. Your mouth as wide as the Panama Canal, the same color as slice of watermelon at a picnic.It is always open but not for me.

I’ll ask you then, where is my picnic? From the shoreline, you will check under the sea for motives and misgivings. Checkmate back to the future. Bounce check over the rainbow.Check “No thanks, I do not wish to be contacted” about past reveries if sad.

I’ve been gliding away unheard. Didn’t you notice the grass stain at the door where I cheerfully left my loafers behind?My soul is in slippers now, so happy. And you will find a feast in someone else.To think that you were the loaf of bread, the communion I used to begger.I will recall that you were also the loafer, stuck in place,a needy Narcissus gazing in the tide pool.

I find the water still and waiting and warm. My boat is made of old leaves and new lawn. I’ll make my communion with breadcrumbs on the sea, hoping they will lead me home tomyself, beyond all symbols, symptoms and predictions. Dig deeper in your reedy greedy slumber. You can keep the words and the ruminations. They don’t travel well.

W.P. Basil has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and offers clients depthpsychology work through narrative therapy. She is also a university instructor, currently teaching psychologyclasses to students in all branches of military She is the co-author of the book SPINOLOGY, which is aJungian approach to marketing and media relations. The book, written with her co-author Sherry Klingerwas published by Depth Publishing in 2014, E-book in 2015 and is available on Amazon Barnes & Noble.

o e t r yP

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201531 <Back to TOC

Hetaira-Mediatrix — Storm Brewing30 x 40 inches, pastel and sumi ink on paper, 2015

Hetaira-Mediatrix — Eternal Moment30-x-40-inches, pastel on paper, 2014

Hetaira-Mediatrix TryptichArt from Vera Long

Hetaira-Mediatrix — Ten Feather Fire30'-x-40' inches, pastel-on-paper, 2014

PAbout the Artist

A key word to describe Vera Long’s art and life would be vital-ity. She simultaneously dwells in a netherworld of tactileemotion and refined ambiguity while exploding out with fiercemark-making and completely unrestrained color. She communi-cates a boldness of statement but with a subtle peripheralsensibility. She grew up in Los Angeles attending French and artschools. She left the urban jungle for another, traveling toAfrica and living with the nomadic people of Uganda—theKaramojong.She was a wild land firefighter for 6 years before starting afamily. Her family narrowly surviving a landslide reignited afierce passion for direct interaction with life through the numi-nous and unseen in art, which makes her doubly happy to callthe spiritually-minded enclave of Ojai home.She is an avid fan of Jungian depth psychology and Toni Wolff'sfeminine archetypal work in the context of exploring and uncov-ering personal mythologies as well as dream interpretation. Sheis a member of the Ojai Studio Artists and is currently teachinga series of workshops in the ancient and beautifully meditativepractice of Suminagashi and Turkish marbleizing with vividlycolored waterborne inks onto silk—known as 'Ebru' (wordderived from Ebrî : “cloud” and Abrû : “water surface”). To seemore work, visit veralong.com.

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 32<Back to TOC

Matthew Fishler is a depth psychologist with a private practice inSherman Oaks. He received an MA and PhD from Pacifica, andserves as Adjunct Faculty at Pacifica (teaching in the Masters inCounseling program). His research and poetry embrace evanescentexperiences, and the via poetica that gives them voice and form. Hispoetry has appeared in a number of literary journals, includingPoetry Quarterly, Psychological Perspectives, Soul Fountain, Ship ofFools, the Aurorean, Spindrift, Avocet, and Psychopoetica.

PreciousBy Matthew Fishler

o e t r yPThe settling of the worldannounces itselfin a song, from a placewhere the ghosts haunting beingcall out from memorials of what is most precious.

Precious, the places you are left behind,seeded to grow,constituted and dispersed.Where you are fugitiveand many.These are the stones, once gathered,that speak to each otherfrom separate graves,that join togetherin singing out from dark corners,calling you, again, into being.

You are the fallen tree.The palm waving in the distance.The bedroom left empty at sunset.Not longing for wholeness lostbut standing in a place,reverberating with solitude,where love was cast away.You are held thereby all that you do not understand,waiting again on the passing.

It will come again.You will be left againto your strange artof making tapestries of stones,of planting seeds in some invisible field.

There you, and all of them,come to rest.

The world is:Three people too many,Dreams lacking dreamers,Dreamers with superficial dreams,Poets forced to compose office memos,That immediately decompose,While monkeys pray and live in monasteries,And monks are exhibited-ignored in zoos.The trees are falling!The trees are dying!Life is deaf!It cannot listen!Life is falling!Life is dying!The trees that are left alive,Try to bear witness toEpisodic culture caught in perpetual reruns,Lazily lived as culture.The world is:Flocks of seagulls taking their time,Strolling through Wyoming.

J. R. Romanyshyn is a 47-year-old poet. I He has lovedmythology all his life.

Seagulls Strolling Through WyomingBy j r romanyshyn

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201533 <Back to TOC

Recently, a new book arrived in ourmidst, emerging from the depths into ourawareness and carrying with it ideaspainted in language that births imagesthat create a sort of magical effect on thereader. Indeed, the manuscript is “imagi-cal”—a dialogue between two astoundingwriters who are also profoundlycognizant of and driven by the power ofdreams and the images they contain. Inthis conversation with the writers, RussellLockhart and Paco Mitchell open up toBonnie Bright about Dreams, Bones & theFuture.

* * *

BB: Great title! Where did it comefrom?

PM: First of all, Bonnie, I would liketo thank you for giving Russ and me theopportunity to talk about this unusualproject, which has occupied much of ourattention for several years. I say“unusual,” because everything about theproject, including the title, wasunplanned. We were less like two schol-ars researching a question than we werelike two old dogs following a scent. Inthat spirit, then, of following the invisible,both the title and the entire book onlybecame gradually visible to us—like thered spot emerging from the black back-ground on the cover.

Several years ago, various elementsin Russ’ writings had begun churningamong similar elements in my own writ-ing until, like volatile chemicals, thewhole mixture began sputtering andemitting sparks. This resulted in a longishemail that I sent Russ, in response to anarticle he had written and a dream hehad related. The resulting email exchangewas so stimulating—insistent, even—thatwe just kept following it wherever it ledus. The result was 144 pages, and thisbook.

Without any deliberate promptingfrom us, certain concerns kept recur-ring—questions of the distant past andthe emerging future. Dreams naturally do

this all the time. But we also found that,in both symbolic and instrumental ways,“bones” also provided a link betweenpast and future.

Of course, in the opening pages ofthe book we treat this in greater detail.

BB: How did you come to collabo-rate together on such a big project as abook, and this book in particular?

RL: Hi Bonnie. I want to echo Paco’sappreciation for your invitation to talkabout Dreams, Bones & the Future. Howit became a book began in a dream I had,back in the winter of 2007. I dreamed Iwas working on a gourd that I was tomake into a “dream-gourd” for castingthe I Ching, to use in working withdreams. I made the dream-gourd andhave regularly used it since that time. Iwrote up this experience for my column,“Dreams in the News,” in the journal,Dream Network.

Shortly after this was published, Ireceived an extraordinary email fromPaco. We were old friends, but had notbeen in touch for a long while. The letterwas so rich, so full of sparks, so full ofdeep consideration of the synchrony ofhis reading my article at the same time ashe was reading books by Brian Swimmeand Thomas Berry, that I was compelledto respond in kind.

His email was something like anoasis providing thirst-quenching watersfor a thirst I did not know I had. Back andforth the emails flew and at some point, Isuggested that others might be inter-ested in what we were talking about, andI proposed that we publish in DreamNetwork. Paco agreed, as did the editor,Roberta Ossana, and so it went, on andon for several years.

By the tenth published dialogue, wereached a point of pause, a repose ofsorts. It was in this state that the idea ofa book took shape and now it has materi-alized. As readers will discover, we arestill in repose, but are about to set ourcraft sailing once again. In many ways, wehave only just begun.

BB: I first discovered your workwhen I read your book, Words as Eggs,Russ, right after you published a newedition in 2012. Paco and I met when hebecame involved in Depth Insights schol-arly eZine and ended up becoming myco-editor for a period of time, as well aspublishing several essays along the way.The commonality you mention abovereally comes down to both your fascina-tion for dreams, and I think this is atopic that many individuals are hungryto explore today. We know that manyancient and indigenous cultures haverelied on the wisdom of dreams toprovide insight and direction for theentire tribe. What do you think the roleof dreams is today for both individualsand the culture? Is it a constant or mightit change in the future, especially in thecontext of the cultural and ecologicalcrisis we are facing today?

PM: Interesting that you use theterm “hunger” in reference to dreams,Bonnie. It suggests there is somethingvital about dreams, something nourishingat a fundamental level. I heartily agree—there is a hunger, and it is far morewidespread than most people realize. Infact, people are starving for somethingthat the current exploitative and narcis-

Dreams, Bones & the FutureA Conversation with the Authors

Russell Lockhart and Paco Mitchell with Bonnie Bright

“People are starving for something that thecurrent exploitative

and narcissist ic culturecannot provide.

It would be a goodthing, then, if morepeople became awareof their own innate

dream-hunger”

sistic culture cannot provide. It would bea good thing, then, if more peoplebecame aware of their own innatedream-hunger, of the deeper needs oftheir souls, even to realize that they areendowed with souls in the first place! Toanyone who bothers to pay attention,over time, dreams offer an unfailingimmersion in the images, demands andneeds of the soul. Along with this comesthe enduring sustenance of a life-longsense of meaning.

Such a life-long sense of meaning,though given, does not come to us with-out effort. But given it is, rather like afirst language that we were born knowingas babies, but have forgotten how tospeak as we “grew up” over time.

Clearly, something vital is lacking inour present situation. The values wemirror to one another as worth strivingfor—mostly celebrity, wealth andpower—all fail the crucial test: They donot guarantee this meaningful sense oflife I’m referring to. For centuries,Christianity and other religious world-views held out against the secular values,but scientific rationalism, the technolo-gies it spawned and the personality thatthey created, left the deeper valuesbehind, and even came to underminewhat often passes for piety today. Butthis world of lost values is precisely whatdreams, given half a chance, cannot failto illumine and regenerate.

It’s that “half-a-chance,” Bonnie,that your own many initiatives, such asDepth Insights and your other venues, orRuss’ and my just-released book, Dreams,Bones & the Future, or our Owl & HeronPress, and so forth, are offering to thosewho are dream-starved.

Knowing what I do about dreams, itstill amazes me that most people, whenoffered an opportunity to talk about theirown dreams or those of others, eitherstand flat-footed, not knowing what tosay, or they turn and run in the oppositedirection. But I believe there is a “streak”in each personality that naturally inclinesin the direction of dreams, whether it isconsciously recognized or not. Call it aroot, if you will, or perhaps an artery orvein, a muscle or spine—somethingorganic, structural and dynamic. The factis that dreams are built-in, vital necessi-ties, like a pulsating heart, or breathing.Or we could think of dreams, it nowoccurs to me, as being as necessary to us

as feathers and wings are to birds.

RL: Bonnie, your questions andcomments set me contemplating thematryoshka, those Russian nested dolls,one inside the other down to the tiniest,innermost, the last often being an infantdoll. Etymological roots in many ways aresimilarly nested. That “-fant” in the wordinfant grew up from the root bhã, mean-ing “to speak.” What I want to add towhat Paco has just said, is this image of“innermost,” which is hidden and not tobe seen on the surface at all. Thus thefood that would fill the hunger you rightlyrefer to can’t readily be seen, while weare stuffing ourselves like foie gras geeseon surface things. Of course, we areentertained and advertised into compul-sive desire for these things. All this outerdirection keeps our attention rivetedthere and so the “voice” of the innermostis drowned out in the din of our dailyworld. Much of the content of Dreams,Bones and the Future can be thought ofas ways of listening to the innermostvoice in spite of clang and clatter of theouter world that Wordsworth long agosaid is “too much with us.”

BB: Paco, when you talk about ourinnate “dream-hunger” and how dreamsare “as necessary to us as feathers andwings are to birds,” something resonateswith me at a very deep level; it’s almostas if you are tapping into a channel thatgoes straight to my core. Taking a cuefrom you both and your obvious love forlanguage and image, I looked up the rootof “resonate” and discovered it means“to sound again.” I found this fascinatingbecause it does appear that when I hear

something that “resonates” then, it is asif it is simply tapping into somethingwithin me that already exists!

Your allusion to dreams being thefirst language, even as babies, and theetymological connection Russ makesregarding the “infant” and “speaking” issynchronistic to me personally. I havealways looked to my dreams to help meunderstand my work in the world, and Ihave had a series of dreams wherebabies suddenly start to speak or sing. Inthese dreams, the common thread isthat I am always caught by surprise atthat hidden or latent capability, thatwisdom inherent in the tiny baby. Ofcourse, Jung talked about an ancientwisdom inherent to all of us, a “two-million year old [hu]man” that serves asfountainhead of age-old archaic wisdomcarried over since the earliest manifesta-tions of life as an evolutionary heritage.The dream wisdom is not only accessibleto all of us—it is our heritage. It is as ifwe live within the dream wisdom itself,just like those nested dolls.

In the book, you both point to theevolutionary history of our ancestors,and the age-old practice of “throwingthe bones” to garner understanding.Russ, you even recount a profounddream you had that led you to a neworacular practice that developed out ofthe dream, that of using a “dream-gourd.” As we begin to wrap up thisall-to-brief exchange, can you both sharesome of your own associations we canfind in the book that encompass theseideas of ancient wisdom, human history,and divination through dreams?

PM: Bonnie, I want to respond toyour question with three parts.

(1) When I refer to dreams withimages like “dream-hunger,” or when Isay that dreams are as necessary to us“as feathers and wings are to birds,” I’mnot just striking out in search of poeticmetaphors. (OK, maybe a little bit.) But Iam being deliberately provocative—aggressive, even—because I seek wordsand images that can burn through the fogthat besets our culture, this widespreadsomnolence that dulls our awareness ofdreams and their value. (This does NOTrefer to the readers of Depth Insights, ofcourse!)

I want us to think about dreams asbeing squarely located within the biologi-

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 34<Back to TOC

“Jung talked about anancient wisdom inherentto all of us, a “two-

mill ion year old[hu]man” that serves asfountainhead of age-oldarchaic wisdom carriedover since the earliest manifestations of life asan evolutionary heritage”

Lockhart, Mitchell, & Bright

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201535 <Back to TOC

cal, evolutionary context out of which weourselves emerged so long ago—at leastthe mammalian wing, if not the avianwing![1] I can’t prove this, but it makeseminent sense to me that we weredreaming long before we were humans,when hair still covered our bodies and wewere creeping and crawling along just likethe rest of our even-more-ancient animalprecursors and cousins. Our present-daycousin, the modern bear, for example,sleeps—and presumably dreams—formonths at a time, but may have begunevolving toward its current form aroundthirty million years ago. That’s a lot ofmammalian sleeping.

So, if my assumptions are anywherenear correct, we humans were dreaminglong before we were humans, long beforewe developed the enlarged brain thatrequired a bigger skull, a more difficultbirth, a slower rate of development ininfancy, more protection through child-hood, and the like. Before tribal huntingsocieties (many of whom worshiped thebear), before agriculture, before civiliza-tion. Thus, dreams may have existed forlonger, and may be far more deeplyembedded in our physical and psychicmake-up, than we can begin to fathom.This begins to touch on the “necessity” ofdreams, which—I might as well say it—could be regarded as cosmic phenomena.

In view of this vast precedence ofdreaming, then, I would ask—whencederives this modern foolishness thatdepreciates so profound, so natural, soinborn, a capacity? You yourself pointout, Bonnie, that dreams come to usladen with all the wisdom of nature. Evenmore—nature’s wisdom speaks to uspersonally in dreams, sending us“messages” that are finely tuned to fit thedeepest aspects of our personalities[2], inand of themselves, and how we fit intoour collectivities! No shoe did more finelyfit any foot! No wonder, then, in timespast, there was a well-recognized tradi-tion that Jung often pointedout—“dreams sent by God,” somnia aDeo missa.

(2) You bring up the matter of “reso-nance,” citing the etymology of theword—re-sonare, “to sound again.” As aguitarist, this is not only a usefulmetaphor to me—saying that something“resonates”—but it is also a physical,emotional, soulful and spiritual fact. If myguitar is on its stand and I speak loudly,

or clear my throat, the strings on theguitar resonate—in fact, the entire bodyof the instrument, strings and all—resonates in response. When flamencoguitar-makers in Spain build the sound-ing-boards (the tops) of their guitars, theywill sand thin pieces of close-grainedspruce to such fine tolerances that if theytap the bare wood it vibrates to a certainnote, usually A. Considering all the glue-joints, the braces, the string-tensions, thesound-hole, the angles of the compo-nents in any fine instrument, theguitar-maker is building resonance into it.And as with instruments—which haveboth bodies and souls—so with humans.

This reminds me of a dream I had inthe early 1970s—before I began myformal study of dreams. That dream ledme to regard “resonance” as an arche-typal characteristic of the cosmos. On aphysical level, of course, resonance maypertain to the gravitational fields of celes-tial bodies, the spacings of planets anddust-rings, super-galactic harmonies andmodulations (if there are such things),and so forth. But I think “resonance” alsopertains to psychological, moral and spiri-tual qualities: As above, so below.

In the dream, I was walking throughthe central hallway of an art school,searching for the artistic activity thatsuited me best. My “search” consisted inmy plucking a single string—a “mono-chord”—that ran from my clavicle to my

pelvis and emitted a single note, withovertones and undertones. Years later Iopened up a Jung volume and cameacross Robert Fludd’s medieval drawingof the Celestial Monochord.[3] The draw-ing fairly burst into my consciousness as amedieval precursor to my dream, depict-ing the divine action of God’s hand tuningthe “monochord.” The vibrations of theprimal string, along with all of the over-tones and undertones—the resonances,we could say—brought the knownuniverse into being, in all its aspects. Insimilar fashion, the vibration of thecentral string in my dream implicitlybrought my entire personality into being.What I was looking for was the central or“fundamental tone,” another word fordestiny, a bio-psycho-spiritual-cosmicpurpose.

So, when you say that something“resonates inwardly,” Bonnie, I too wantto pay attention, for these and manyother reasons.

(3) The final aspect of your questiontouches on the origins of our book,which, as Russ explains in hisIntroduction, began with a train of eventsthat, over time, led to his having aportentous dream. The dream was noth-ing less than a new form of access tooracular awareness, virtually invented inthe dream—a new way of casting the oldI Ching. This gives a clue as to the deeplycreative functions that can be found indreams. Russ called the device thedream-gourd and subsequently brought itinto material existence.[4]

I know this touches on ground wecovered earlier, but you asked for anexample from the book! Also, it’s hard toover-emphasize the excitement I feltwhen I first read—then re-read—Russ’article about the dream-gourd and I feltthe intuitions start clanging away in me,resonating with the volume I was readingat the time—The Universe Story, by BrianSwimme and Thomas Berry. One particu-lar phrase got the ball rolling, where theydescribed the archaic, mantic tradition of“throwing the bones,” and the universallyrecognized fact that, when the bones leftthe human hand, they became subject tothe governing forces of the universe. Thatis when the bones took on their uncannyoracular power—when they were nolonger subject to human control.

In a nutshell, that is what Russ and Ihave been pursuing throughout the

“Nature’s wisdomspeaks to us personallyin dreams, sending us‘messages’ that are

finely tuned to fit thedeepest aspects of our

personalit ies”

Dreams, Bones & the Future

(Robert Fludd’s Celestial Monochord, 1618)

P

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book—following the subtle traces thatbegin to reveal themselves when humansgive up their fantasies of control.

RL. Paco has laid out a broad foun-dation for tending not only the evolutionof dreams, but by implication, the impor-tance of dreams as a causal factor inevolution itself. This factor is one reasonwhy I describe dreams as always havingto do with the future, and also why Iemphasize the fictive purpose of dreams.Fiction is alive with possibilities, whiletrying to pin down dreams to singularfacts of understanding, interpretation orexplanation is essentially pinning thebutterfly’s wings to the pin board. I’m nota fan of netting the butterfly in this way.As hard as it is, I want the butterfly to“lead” the way. Of course, I am herespeaking of butterfly as psyche, dream asbutterfly.

I’m imagining building an outposton the far edge of Paco’s foundation andgazing out into the future. As our culturaldominants begin to collapse, and chaosbegins to render our traditions intoshards, each screaming for survival, I hearJung’s insight that the new dominants arebeing born in the objective psyche, andthat these new dominants will come into

being through the dreams and visions ofindividuals. To the extent that individualsare immersed to point of drowning incollectivity, they will not hear the call ofthe future that begins to speak to themin their dreams, in their visions, in experi-ences of synchronicity. Very often it isthe broken individuals who will hear first.This is why I pay attention to the dreamsof people on the street. Very often it willbe through the artist, usually the outcastor unrecognized artist, not the one whois taken up with the contemporary seduc-tions of money, that the future begins itsintimations in consciousness. Such inti-mations must be hosted and there is noroom for such hosting when everyone istaken up with what Walter Wink calls the“malignant narcissism” of the day.Psyche’s evolution is at work in thecollective unconscious, as Jung experi-enced and described; and what Paco andI have tried to do in Dreams, Bones & theFuture, is to illustrate various ways inwhich individuals may begin to partici-pate in this effort before it is too late. Wehope to take up these issues even moredeeply in the next volume of ourdialogues. So, you can see Bonnie, weshare at least some degree of optimism!

Notes

[1] www.improverse.com/ed-articles/ richard_wilkerson_2003_jan_evolution.htm

[2] The Greek word for “messenger” isangelos, from which we derive “angel” inEnglish. For a fascinating discussion of thepremise that every dream, potentially, is an“angel,” see Russell Lockhart, “Dreams AsAngels: Parts I – IV, Dream NetworkJournal, Vol. 31, Nos. 1-4 (Spring 2012-Winter 2013).

[3] http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/boe/img/pl40.jpg

[4] Pictures of the dream-gourd and itsmanner of being used in casting the I Chingcan be seen at the “Dreamgourd” blog athttp://dreamgourd.blogspot.com.

Russell Lockhart, a Jungian analyst for 40years, is author of Words As Eggs, PsycheSpeaks, and many articles in depthpsychology. Currently focusing on thefictive purpose of dreams, commodifica-tion of desire, and a novel, Dreams: TheFinal Heresy and projects as co-editor ofOwl & Heron Press.

Paco Mitchell is a Jungian author, artist,therapist and editor, dedicated to thestudy of dreams. His main interest is inthe psychic developments taking shape inthe collective unconscious and strivingtoward consciousness in dreams. Co-editor of the Owl & Heron Press, Pacolives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A Child in the Old WorldBy Mary Ann Bencivengo

A child in the old worldasks her mother where babies come fromand this is the reply:

I am no differentthan the soil, find a delightin that. Not ever any needto differentiate a thingfrom any other thing.That’s where we come from,from any other thing.No part of us nota part of any thing.No thing not evernot a part of us.

Mary Ann Bencivengo attends Pacifica GraduateInstitute in the Depth Psychology program for Jungianand Archetypal Studies. Prior to that, she received herMFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on Poetryafter earning a BFA in Creative Writing.

At the edge of the vineyard, near an

Old pagoda overlooking a lake ofJade, I rest on a shady bank, drowsyWith the first languid haze of summer.

Nearby, a dark goddess—a great blackSwan—nests in a womb of saplings,Where the wind whispers mysteries.Poetry bubbles up from deep springs,

Overflowing my soul. Sweet perfume ofJasmine intoxicates in the warm breeze.

R. L. Boyer is an award-winning poet, fiction author,and screenwriter. He is currently a doctoral student inthe Art and Religion program at the GraduateTheological Union in Berkeley, CA, and holds an MA inDepth Psychology from Sonoma State University. He isa regular contributor to Depth Insights.

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Lockhart, Mitchell, & Bright

Chateau MontelenaBy R. L. Boyer

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Decades, I wandered....By Eva Rider

Decades I wandered through dusty deserts of time.How many have they numbered?Can I ever recall?

Swept through the violent tides of change,I have descended into dark depthless nights of snowdrifts,in deserted cracks of doorwaysI have arisen with the exultant joy of hatching new life in Spring

Still, I wandered, with no direction, carried on a vagrant cloud drifting on windhanging onto the delicate tails old spun dreamsthese too, now long since forgotten.

Memory first stirs through sense of smell, and only then,weaves back into receptive cells of body.

I began my life in a country still vibrating in sullen, stunned shock from abloodthirsty stampede of the raw power of ragesprung from the loins ofthe Great Mother, running red with her bloodbroken in eternal battles betweenthe red and the white mothers, they,the foes of blood of life and and bone of death,of darkness and of light.

All one now,always, it has been so.I did not know my own name in those long, lost years of wanderingand stumbling—seeking,between realms of star drift and clay bottom

It was the distant echo of my own name whispered on the wind that was the first call toreturn,always, it accompanied me, a friend, wrapped in smoky dreams leading tosofter landings.

Eva Rider, M.A., M.F.T., is a Jungian psychotherapist in California whose work encompasses unveiling the dreamand its relationship to myth, and the Emerging Creative Process. Eva has studied Western Metaphysics for 30years and incorporates Jungian theory, dreams, alchemy and myth in her work. She has taught at John F.Kennedy University, and is a graduate of the Marion Woodman BodySoul® Leadership Training. Find more atwww.reclaimingsoul.com

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Jung and Phenomenology by RogerBrooke must be congratulated for

providing a much needed phenomenolog-ical interpretation of Carl Jung’s writingusing Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Theimportance of the publication of thiswork can be recognised as (Stenner,1998, p.1) writes that the application ofMartin Heidegger‘s philosophy to thescience of psychology would have“profound implications for the discipline”.This book by Brooke was originallypublished in 1991 and has just been re-published in January 2015, although itwas disappointing to read that this bookhas received minimal revision from itsoriginal publication.

Brooke notes, “I decided that wewould not revise this book or rewrite it asa second edition” and the extent ofBrooke’s revision involves “many changesthroughout the text, but they have onlybeen words or phrases that I think couldhave been more clearly written. I deletedone or two sentences and even a shortparagraph from the original text becausethey seemed to me to be confusing andunnecessary” (Brooke, 2015, p.x). Brookealso says “Certainly I would approachsome areas, or chapters, differently, andthere are some themes that I would havedeveloped much more thoroughly, but Iam satisfied that the book still stands”(Brooke, 2015, p. x). Brooke’s satisfactionwith his book is understandable; he hasachieved a very important foundation todevelop Jung’s work with phenomenol-ogy which includes explaining conceptssuch as psyche, self, individuation, arche-types and the unconscious withHeidegger’s phenomenology. However, inthis book review I hope to highlight thatBrooke’s achievements have only laid afoundation for this area of work, and thatmany new insights could have beenshown if the 2015 edition had beenupdated with recent literature relevant tothis area of research. This review alsoaims to demonstrate to the reader that

Brooke’s Heideggerian interpretation ofJung can be extended much further bydeveloping a more systematic examina-tion of the implications of Heidegger’swriting for Jungian theory and practicebecause only “Chapters 5-8 thus consti-tute a serious effort to rethink basic andclassical Jungian concepts with the aid ofphilosophical phenomenological thought”(Murray, 1994, p.137).

A number of writers have high-lighted the need to apply Heidegger’swriting to psychology. For example,(Knowles, 2002) reviewed the literaturethat has compared the writing of Jungand Heidegger together. Knowles explains

the work that has been achieved inEnglish are made of a few dissertationsmostly written over 40-50 years ago aswell as only the one book by Brooke.Knowles review highlighted the scarcityof research in this area as well as theshortage of published work available to awide audience that brings Jung andHeidegger’s writing together. In addition,van Deuzen says “Few psychologists andpsychotherapists have gone through thetrouble of studying Heidegger in anydetail” (Letteri, 2009, p.ix) and numeroustexts are required to help elaborate hiswork into psychology and I want to makethe point that Brooke’s work has made asignificant contribution to filling some ofthis gap between Jung and Heidegger.

The importance of this book byBrooke can be highlighted by explainingwhat Heidegger can offer Jung’s writing.This can be articulated by recognisingHeidegger’s explicit engagement with

psychoanalysis (Heidegger, 2001) in theZollikon seminars organised by psychia-trist Medard Boss from 1959-1969. As aresult of this engagement, Boss devel-oped psychoanalysis with Heidegger’sphenomenology and ontology to estab-lish a new psychotherapeutic methodnamed Daseinsanalysis (Boss, 1963). TheZollikon seminars were published in 2001and therefore Brooke did not include thispublication in his original book in 1991 orunfortunately in the re-publication in2015. Although Brooke did not includethis publication, it is important, as it high-lights the ontological significance of hiswork and that he carries Heidegger owncritique of psychoanalysis forward.

In the Zollikon seminars, Heideggersays the creation of the unconscious inpsychoanalysis had disastrous conse-quences as it postulated a hidden entityto explain the mind which could not beperceived and therefore could not beverified. In contrast, Heidegger explainsphenomenology allows psychoanalytictheories to be explained using directevidence found in the phenomena oflived experience. Brooke is not explicitabout his agreement with theDaseinsanalytic critique of psychoanaly-sis, but his consistency is evident whenhe says “Jung saw as a phenomenologisteven as he generally continued to thinktheoretically as a natural scientist”(Brooke, 1991, p.10). Brooke also recog-nises “Jung always struggled with theproblems of writing” and also highlightsthat Jung realised his explanation of hisideas were problematic “‘I can formulatemy thoughts only as they break out ofme. It is like a geyser. Those who comeafter me will have to put them in order’”(Brooke, 2015, p.2).

Heidegger’s phenomenology allowsJung’s writing on human behaviour to beappropriated and put in order by remov-ing unverifiable, arbitrary and abstractconcepts and this is achieved by outliningthe horizons within which an individual’spossible ways of existing can be selected.Brooke has recognised this need and has

“The importance of thisbook by Brooke can be highlighted byexplaining what

Heidegger can offerJung’s writ ing”

Review of Jung and Phenomenology by

Roger BrookeBy Matthew Gildersleeve

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 201539 <Back to TOC

appropriated some of Jung’s writing withHeidegger’s phenomenology which allowsthe “conceptual monstrosity of inhumanmechanisms” (Cooper, 2003, p.37) to bereplaced and to be constructed byremaining with what is immediatelyperceived and does “not get lost in“scientific” abstractions, derivations,explanations, and calculations estrangedfrom the immediate reality of the givenphenomena” (Boss, 1963, p.30).

Heidegger’s criticism towardspsychoanalysis “is positive” because it iscapable of explaining human behaviourthrough lived experience rather thanfrom “distant and abstract positions”(Boss, 1963, p.59). As a result, Brooke’swork can be seen to appropriate Jung’swriting positively by avoiding the“dangerous scientific tendency to fleefrom the immediately given phenomena”(Boss, 1963, p.59). Brooke allows Jung’swork to be articulated and understoodthrough immediate reflective experienceof the language of phenomenology.Brooke states this clearly when he sayshis book “is an attempt to see throughJung’s writings to the phenomena he saw,or, to use a different metaphor, to hearthrough his words to what he was tryingto say, and to express this in a phenome-nologically accurate way” and “he lackedthe conceptual tools to express hisinsights in a phenomenologically rigorousway” (Brooke, 2015, p.2).

In the Zollikon seminars, Heideggeralso explains that psychoanalysis needs tobe grounded in an understanding of thehuman being as Dasein to apply phenom-enology to psychoanalysis. Brooke’sproject clearly builds on this aspect ofHeidegger’s critique of psychoanalysis asBrooke also argues that Jung’s concept ofpsyche should be understood as Dasein.For example, Brooke says “psyche asunderstood by Jung approachesHeidegger’s explication of Dasein, andinterpreted in terms of Dasein it achievesontological and structural clarity”(Brooke, 2015, p.12). Heidegger alsoexplains that the meaning of the humanbeing as Dasein is an openness to exis-tence and Brooke also advocates thatJung’s concept of individuation involvesappropriating an openness to possibilitiesfor being in the world because “individua-tion does not shut one out from theworld but gathers the world to oneself” ,2015, p.109).

As a result, it can be appreciatedthat Brooke builds on Heidegger’scritique of psychoanalysis in the Zollikonseminars by covering areas of psycho-analysis that Heidegger did not engagewith. Brooke has provided a foundationfor future research to explain the writingof Jung with Heidegger. Brooke argues“Jung did not write consistently from anyparticular perspective, which reflects hiscontinual dissatisfaction with his ownformulations” (Brooke, 2015, p.2) andBrooke has provided an important bookwhich starts the ball rolling to provideconsistency to explain Jung’s writing inthe light of Heidegger’s philosophy.However I want to highlight that there isstill much more work in this area of studyto pursue and “to reap the tremendouslyrich harvest” of insights Heidegger canprovide to Jung’s writing. For example,(Loparic, 1999) says when Heideggercritiques psychoanalysis he acceptsFreud’s observations but these observa-tions need to be translated into a“language of description of phenomena”

(Heidegger, 2001, p.345). Heidegger recognizes that Freud has

discovered many ‘ontic’ experiences suchas projection, identification, and repres-sion, however for these behaviours to beadequately explained, these discoveriesneed to be reinterpreted in the light ofHeidegger phenomenological ontology ofDasein. Thus, Loparic says all behaviourencountered in psychoanalysis must beunderstood as “particular modes of beingin the world, which make them possible”(Loparic, 1999, p.14) and when thesebehaviours are explained they form theregional ontology of psychiatry. Loparicrecognises this regional ontology ofpsychiatry is still lacking and “remains along overdue desideratum for the discipli-

nary framework of daseinsanalysis”(Loparic, 1999, p.14). Brooke has gonesome way to extending the regionalontology of psychiatry by explainingJung’s ideas such as psyche, ego, individu-ation, self, archetypes and theunconscious with Heidegger phenome-nology, but there are many other aspectsof Jung’s writing that have yet to betranslated into the “language of descrip-tion of phenomena” and “particularmodes of being in the world, which makethem possible”.

Although Boss has outlined aregional ontology of psychiatry forFreud’s concepts including projection,and repression, and Jung’s concepts ofego, self, individuation, psyche, uncon-scious and archetypes have received thesame attention by Brooke, a phenomeno-logical explanation of a large number ofideas from Jung‘s writing have beenunexamined. A short list of these includeproviding a Heideggerian explanation forJung’s writing on active imagination,alchemy, transference, dreams, psychicenergy, specific archetypes including(hero, mother, trickster, anima, child), thepractice of psychotherapy, synchronicityand religious themes contained in volume11 of Jung’s collected works (Psychologyand Religion). Brooke says the concern ofa phenomenological interpretation ofJung is “to return to Jung’s texts and thephenomena they reveal” and this reviewhas highlighted a large number of areasin Jung’s work which is yet to be investi-gated to “bring to light some of thesephenomena in a fresh way” by a “returnto the things themselves” (Brooke, 2015,p.xvii).

It is also important to note thatthere are many publications ofHeidegger’s missing from Brooke’s refer-ence list. Brooke only references four ofHeidegger’s publications out of a selec-tion of over 70 different publications inEnglish translation and with over 100publications in the HeideggerGesamtausgabe. It is clear that the fullforce of a Heideggerian interpretation ofJung’s work is nowhere near complete orexhausted.

Brooke also lists 11 convergentthemes on page 89 between Heideggerand Jung which are only briefly discussedwith typically only one paragraph on eachtheme. These themes include spatiality,the hermeneutic circle, pre-reflectiveunderstanding, ‘ownmost’, bodiless, fini-tude, imagination, truth and theauthentic attitude. These themes cantherefore be examined in much more

Jung and Phenomenology

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“Brooke has providedan important book

which starts the ballroll ing to provide

consistency to explainJung’s writ ing in thelight of Heidegger’s

philosophy”

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depth and should be extended to thesame length or longer than the chaptersthat Brooke provides on Jung’s ideas ofpsyche, archetypes and individuation etc.

In conclusion, this review has high-lighted some achievements of RogerBrooke’s “Jung and Phenomenology” ascarrying Heidegger’s critique of psycho-analysis in the Zollikon seminars forwardinto the 21st century and by providing aphenomenological critique of Jung’sanalytical psychology. Brooke’s work isimportant as a number of authors haverecognised the lack of research that hasexplained Jung’s work with Heidegger’sphilosophy, and “Jung andPhenomenology” has provided a strongfoundation for future research in thisarea of investigation. Finally, this reviewhas also highlighted, that there are manyother aspects of Jung’s writing that haveyet to be translated into the “languageof description of phenomena” and“particular modes of being in the world,which make them possible”, and therehas also yet to be through engagement

of Jung’s writing with the full force of theHeidegger Gesamtausgabe.

References

Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis andDaseinsanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

Brooke, R. (1991). Jung and phenomenol-ogy. London: Routledge.

Brooke, R. (2015). Jung and phenomenol-ogy. London: Routledge.

Cooper, M. (2003). Existential therapies.Sage

Heidegger, M. (2001). Zollikon seminars:Protocols, conversations, letters.Northwestern University Press.

Knowles, D. S. (2002). Along a PathApart: Conflict and Concordance in CGJung and Martin Heidegger (Doctoraldissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute).

Letteri, M. (2009). Heidegger and thequestion of psychology: Zollikon andbeyond (Vol. 200). Rodopi.

Letteri, M. (2009). Heidegger and the

question of psychology: Zollikon andbeyond (Vol. 200). Rodopi.

Loparic, Z. (1999). Heidegger andWinnicott. Natureza humana, 1(1), 103-135.

Murray, E. L. (1994). Roger Brooke, Jungand Phenomenology. Journal ofPhenomenological Psychology, 25(1),135-141.

Stenner, P. (1998). Heidegger and theSubject Questioning ConcerningPsychology. Theory & Psychology, 8(1),59-77.

Matthew Gildersleeve teaches andconducts research with the University ofQueensland in Brisbane, Australia. He iscurrently working on a project involvingthe phenomenological ontology ofpsychoanalysis. His past research hasincluded multisensory perception, humanfactors psychology, human-computerinteraction, phenomenology, existential-ism and clinical psychology andpsychotherapy.

Matthew Gildersleeve

Dark Stars By Brian Michael Tracy

I am told when your time comesthey fall from belowfrom beyond the surface waters of fleshturning the eye on itselfcondensing everything it has ever seenand dismissing everything it has notuntil all that is left is the naked outline of a mind:

a silhouette of space and time, containedshimmering at its endsobscuring a divine radiancelike an eclipse, moments before fulfillmentlingering, ever so brieflyin a glow of despairbefore consuming its own light.

Brian Michael Tracy is the author of three books of poetry,most recently Opaque Traveler: A Dream Sequence in Verseand two CD’s of poetry and music: His work has appeared innumerous publications and on spoken word radio programsthroughout the United States and Canada. He is currentlyworking on his third CD of poetry and music. See more ofBrian’s work at www.BrianMichaelTracy.com

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IN THE GARDENby Roy Rosenblatt

I am crouching low, one knee pressing against the Earth for balance.Into a freshly dug hole, I pepper in long cured soil amendments.The pungent, earthen aroma slows me to a savoring pause,then coax a buddleia out of her nursery container and fluidly plant.These spikes of purple flowers will summon butterfliesand imagining these visits brings a joy.

I raise myself up to my full height, an admiring witness to all this beauty.In the garden, I am happier, kinder, wiser.And then, as always, I am drawn into the gapbetween sense-fed reason andthe mysterious realm of sightless sight, the voiceless voice, soundless sound.

Reason is denied comfort And unable trespass, my mind rails.Yet I feel it deeply each time the flesh of my hands or feetcaress the flesh of the Earth.For I too am rooted in, and draw my nourishment fromthe soils of Gaia.

A cloud passes, sunlight shimmering through windblown branches of a majestic Oak,one of three such sentinels that protect this garden.A warming ray catches the yellow of wings.A Monarch Butterfly engages the freshly planted buddleiain a weightless, fluttering dance.

Even now, searching for the words,I am struck with silence.

Roy Rosenblatt is new to poetry. He originally cut his teeth in the field of screenwriting,settling into a comfortable lifestyle in what is known as a script doctor, being summonedwhen existing screenplays were on life support. When the first of his 2 children was born in1987, he sensed deeply that he could not maintain the intensity of this craft and be presentfor dad-hood. Now both are grown and he is writing again.

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Aliana is any of various long-stemmed, woody vines thatare rooted in the soil at ground level and use trees, as

well as other means of vertical support, to climb up to thecanopy to get access to well-lit areas of the forest. Lianas areespecially characteristic of tropical moist deciduous forests andrainforests, including temperate rainforests. Lianas can formbridges amidst the forest canopy, providing arboreal animalswith paths across the forest. These bridges can protect weakertrees from strong winds.

* * * * * * *Dolio is the hero and journey maker for his people who

reside seven miles inland in the rain forest near Tamarindo,Province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. While most of what heknows about the west is apocalyptical, he is determined todeploy his jungle love to build additional income and a sacredunion between the growing tourist trade and his extended

family.What many call “eco-alchemy” is called something else in

his native language; Dolio is practicing important transitionstrategies to stay healthy and knows his part in the balancingact for a new sacred Earth.

One key idea for Dolio’s community is to live and worklocally, keeping costs down—and using abundant resources. Asecond guide is the caring for the community ethic from perma-culture.

Liana is a multi-variety local rain forest woody vine thatgrows fast and has many uses in his village including latticestructure for the dome roofs, perimeter security and largebaskets to carry dirt and food. Villagers wear the bright andcolorful flowers when they are in bloom.

Dolio wants to create a sustainable village and sees a wayto earn money for his people and share sacred values with thetourists on the beach through basket weaving workshops. Buthe is shielding westerners from his village at this time forhealth, legal and economic concerns.

The village council has adopted a resilience creed thatmeans that they can teach and share goods and storiesbetween the contrasting cultures using symbols, like vinebaskets and flowers. The village understands the deeper spiri-tual power and service of their symbols and wants to bolstertheir use on the coast. Like on their new workshop banner,simple symbols do not need an interpreter.

Dolio wants to create a sustainable village and sees a wayto earn money for his people and share sacred values with thetourists on the beach through basket weaving workshops. Buthe is shielding westerners from his village at this time forhealth, legal and economic concerns.

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Gratitude to Davis, CA, Roundtable participants for theirideas.

Depth Insights, Issue 7, Spring/Summer 2015 42<Back to TOC

“Liana’s Sacred Hands”New Myth #67

By Willi Paul

Willi Paul is a green certified business and sustainability consultant who launched PlanetShifter.com Magazine on Earth Day 2009 tobuild a database of interviews and articles about innovation, sustainability, and the mystic arts. His bliss renewed in 2011 when hedesigned openmythsource.com to produce new mythic stories with modern alchemies. His work now focuses on what is sacred is tous, the community building power of permaculture and the transformative energy in the new alchemy (ex: soil, sound, digital) andglobal mythologies.Willi earned his permaculture design certification in August 2011 at the Urban Permaculture Institute, SF. Willi’s work is featured inan article at the Joseph Campbell Foundation and additional videos are available on YouTube.com. See more atwww.NewMythologist.com.