Reviews

PSYCHE & SOMA: HEALING THE MIND-BODY SPLIT

Editor's Note: Luanne Sberna presented on "Psyche & Soma: Healing The Mind-Body Split" this past May 27th at the Fletcher Free Library, Burlington, VT. Below is her synopsis of her presentation which included lecture, body movement, and discussion. Ms. Sberna has an M.A. in Dance Movement Therapy and is a long-time private practitioner of this approach to healing with an office in Burlington.

This workshop addressed re-uniting mind and body using Dance-Movement Therapy (DMT) techniques based on the psychology of C.G. Jung. An overview of his therapeutic method called Active Imagination and a brief history of DMT and its interface with Active Imagination were presented. The audience then participated in a movement activity engaging the mind and body. This was followed by the viewing of the video, At the Threshold: A Journey to the Sacred through the Integration of Jungian Psychology and the Expressive Arts, which featured the work of Dance-Movement Therapist Carolyn Grant Fay. In this way, concepts about the integration of Jungian psychology with mind-body therapies were discussed, experienced, and viewed in practice at the C.G. Jung Center of Houston, Texas. The following is a synopsis of the presentation.

Active Imagination

The concept and practice of Active Imagination was derived from Jung’s own experiences with the contents of his unconscious after the traumatic severing of his relationship with Sigmund Freud. Jung decided to engage the fantasies and dreams that arose through dialogue, art, and play. He felt it was essential to maintain a self-reflective, conscious point of view during this process so that insight can develop and be applied to one’s life. With that in mind, the noted Jungian analyst Robert Johnson broke the steps of Active Imagination down in this way:
1. Inviting the Unconscious: for example by personifying a mood, feeling or fantasy image, person or situation to get started. He warns against using a real person in one’s life as this can lead to difficulties with that person.
2. Dialoguing and Experiencing: Through conversation and/or play, dance or art, engage with the image, sticking with one image at a time rather than flitting from image to image. He reminds us to engage our feelings in the situation, to listen to the symbol or image, and to reply with our own viewpoint and values.
3. Adding the ethical element of values: in other words, conducting oneself in a way consistent with one’s values and character rather than being carried away by a particular archetype or aspect of onself.
4. Making the experience concrete: This does not mean to act out the fantasies or content of Active Imagination literally. Rather, by creating a physical ritual the essential meaning, insight or principle derived from the Active Imagination experience can be integrated into practical life.

Jung encouraged his patients to draw, paint, write and dance to engage the unconscious through Active Imagination, and he felt a benefit of this method is that it is a way to gain independence from the analyst by doing one’s own inner work. In the book Active Imagination by Jungian Analyst and Dance-Movement Therapist Joan Chodorow, an account of Active Imagination engaging the body is presented:

When I was in analysis with Miss Toni Wolff, I often had the feeling that something in me hidden deep inside wanted to express itself; but I also knew that this ‘something’ had no words. As we were looking for another means of expression, I suddenly had the idea: ‘I could dance it.’ Miss Wolff encouraged me to try. The body sensation I felt was oppression, the image came that I was inside a stone and had to release myself from it to emerge as a separate, self standing individual. The movements that grew out of the body sensations had the goal of my liberation from the stone just as the images had. It took a good deal of the hour. After a painful effort I stood there, liberated. This very freeing event was much more potent than the hours in which we only talked.

Dance-Movement Therapy: A Brief History

Marian Chace, who had been a professional modern dancer, is credited with developing the discipline of Dance-Movement Therapy. In the 1940's her work using dance with psychiatric patients at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. drew the attention of the staff psychiatrists. They were struck by her ability to help psychotic, withdrawn and isolated patients begin to reach outward and express themselves through movement, often for the first time in many years.

As word of Chace’s work spread among the psychiatric and dance communities, a modern dancer and dance teacher on the West Coast, Mary Whitehouse, was also coming to see that her work was more than just teaching dance. After reading articles by Chace, she realized she was on the right track in using dance as a tool to help individuals experience their authentic selves and work through emotional/physical blocks to a fulfilling life. However, she was working with a nonpsychotic population in her dance studio, and was greatly influenced by her experiences in Jungian analysis, thus the methods she used were different from Chace’s. Whitehouse adopted many of Jung’s theories in her work, including that of Active Imagination which came to be called Authentic Movement when the body was the means of expression.

By the 1960's the Dance Therapy apprentices of pioneers like Chace and Whitehouse were working in a variety of clinical settings and were influenced by many theoretical perspectives, including Jungian. They formed the American Dance Therapy Association which defines Dance-Movement Therapy as the psychotherapeutic use of dance and movement to further the psychological and physical integration of an individual by effecting changes in thought, feeling and behavior. The ADTA has set the educational standards for becoming a Dance-Movement Therapist and provides professional support and education.

The Interface of Dance-Movement Therapy and Active Imagination

The Jungian interface with Dance-Movement and other Mind-Body therapies starts with the perspective of the body as more than a machine doing the mind’s “work” for it. The body is a part of and tells our story as much as our words or actions do. The way that the body has embodied emotions and attitudes as reflected in its shape, functioning and movement are explored. From a Jungian perspective, we could say that there is an archetype of embodiment, from the parts to the whole, as well as an experience of being in our personal bodies. The body can symbolize what is going on in the mind and vice versa. In Dance-Movement Therapy, that awareness is held as the body engages in the process of self discovery and healing of mind-body wounds.

The Jungian approach to Dance-Movement Therapy draws strongly from the work of Mary Whitehouse. She brought Active Imagination into the body with the technique of Authentic Movement which she described as the experience of being moved from within rather than consciously directing movement. She compared it to what she came to call “invisible movement,” which is when even though movement is occurring, it is not genuine. Whitehouse used guided movement activities to help her students and patients begin to experience the difference between consciously directed movements, invisible movement (which can overlap with directed movement) and authentic movement. During these activities she would often apply Jungian concepts such as that of polarity or opposites to the body. For example, she would have participants work in movement with left and right, up and down, open and closed, etc. to help them get in touch with inner feelings. She felt that the “Self,” which Jung defined as the archetype of wholeness (as compared to the “self”), takes over moving the physical body when the ego gives up control.

When movers engage in the process of Authentic Movement, they quiet the mind so the unconscious can present itself through movement. Sometimes the movement happens on its own, sometimes it is prompted by imagery or sensation. The mover waits with eyes closed to be moved from within; however, techniques described in Johnson’s first step of inviting the unconscious through evoking a dream image or part of oneself, for example, can also be used. Authentic Movement is practiced in the presence of a therapist or witness who holds the safety of the space, the awareness of conscious time and who simultaneously tracks both her own inner experience and what her mover is doing. This process alters the mind-body systems of the mover and the witness, leading not only to psychological insight but also to the embodiment of that insight, re-uniting mind and body.

Many forms of mind-body therapies including Dance-Movement Therapy actively engage the body in the process of self discovery and becoming that Jung called Individuation. We can credit Jung for being at the forefront of research and practice that paved the way for modern mind-body therapies and the rediscovery of many ancient mind-body traditions, bringing them to the awareness of Westerners so that as he predicted, a new yoga, or union, of mind and body will be achieved.

Bibliography
Adler, Janet. Offering From the Conscious Body, The Discipline of Authentic Movement. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002.
Bernstein, Penny Lewis (ed.). Eight Theoretical Approaches in Dance-Movement Therapy. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1979.
Bernstein, Penny Lewis (ed.). Theoretical Approaches in Dance-Movement Therapy, (3rd edition). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1981.
Chodorow, Joan. Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology, Moving Imagination. New York: Rutledge, 1991.
Johnson, Robert A: Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.
Keleman, Stanley. Myth and the Body: A Colloquy With Joseph Campbell. Berkeley, CA: Center Press, 1999.

Levy, Fran EdD. MSW ADTR. Dance Movement Therapy: A Healing Art. Washington, D.C., AAHPERD, 1988.

- Submitted by Luanne Sberna

Psyche and Wilderness: Journeying into the Depths. A Presentation by Dr. Teresa Arendell.

“I invite you to spend a few minutes getting oriented and settled into our topic today, which is, specifically, wilderness and psyche. So I invite you to relax, settle into your seat and see where wilderness takes you…”

So began Dr. Teresa Arendell’s presentation for The C.G. Jung Society of Vermont’s spring lecture entitled, Psyche and Wilderness: Journeying into the Depths. For the next couple of hours, Dr. Arendell, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Colby College, and Diploma Candidate at the C.G. Jung Institute–Boston, guided us through an exploration of wilderness in its various forms and manifestations: wilderness as universal theme and intellectual construct; as collective experience and individual experience; as natural world and phenomenon; and as numinous archetypal symbol.

“Wilderness, and our consideration of wilderness,” she said in her introduction, “moves us into the mystery of psyche and nature, to the mystery of consciousness. It directs us to the very core of the splits which dominate our psychological and cultural lives in this modern era. Wilderness – whether as metaphor, image, experience, or place – is at the heart of the journey of self-exploration, the movement toward greater consciousness.” A widening of consciousness is a challenging task because it requires a healing of the splits within ourselves (and the collective): the split between psyche and matter, ego-consciousness and its connection to the unconscious, thinking and feeling, etc. These various separations or “estrangements” that we carry within are mirrored in the external world via the kind of relationship we have with the natural world. The hermetic axiom “As above, so below” speaks to this interrelationship between outer and inner, between the wilderness of the manifest world and the wilderness of the unconscious psyche. Thus, Dr. Arendell’s main point is that how we live in one has a direct correlation with how we live in the other.

Slide images of the New England landscape, particularly of Maine and Mt. Katahdin, served as the visual backdrop and projective screen for what Dr. Arendell was ultimately inviting each one of us to do during her presentation: to examine our beliefs about nature and to embark on a psychological journey into the interior landscape of our own psyche. To help us enter into this invitation, she presented her case by first talking about our estrangement from nature, what this means psychologically, and then spoke about Jung’s powerful connection to nature. Rather than keep it at the level of other, she opened the possibility for directed inner dialogue by posing a number of questions for inner, private engagement: “We must keep asking ourselves: What is wilderness to me? Where am I right now and, if in the wilderness, what kind of wilderness? How do I know that? What are the images? What are the feelings?.” During this questioning she also reminded us always to be mindfull that “what wilderness means will shift and evolve,” as meanings inevitably and always do. Dr. Arendell stressed at a latter point that by actively engaging in our inner dialogue with our Self we “re-member” ourselves, that is, collect back what we have disowned, by “return[ing] to the wisdom of our psyches” and in this way begin to heal the splits within us. But, she reminded us, quoting Hillman, “an individual’s harmony with his or her own deep self requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world [since] the deepest self cannot be confined to in here because we can’t be sure it is not also or even entirely out there!”

Our estrangement from nature, Dr. Arendell pointed out, “is unique in human history.” One hasn’t far to go to confirm this. We all have had experiences or heard of situations where it is easier to attempt to control nature than to cooperate with it. In Vermont, troublesome animals – animals that intrude on human space and/or compete for resources - such as beavers, bears and moose, are more often than not killed rather than accommodated by a slight change in human behavior. As to forest and wetlands, even in our environmentally enlightened state of Vermont, these are natural resources to be protected or harvested dependent on human need. In both cases, wild animals and the natural environment, human gain in whatever guise, trumps nature. For Dr. Arendell, a potent reminder of this reality is the wolf, an animal that serves to highlight man’s assault on wilderness during the 19th century when it was hunted to near extinction; even today in the few northwestern states where wolf populations still exist, Alaska and Montana, wolves carry a bounty and are hunted with assault rifles from the air.

For much of her presentation, Dr. Arendell focused on the wolf and its fate in North America “because it represents our history with wilderness and our deep psychological ambivalence about wilderness and all things wild.” Through an amplification of the symbol of wolf as portrayed in fairy tales, myths, and the Bible, she highlighted the different relationships humans have had with the animal at different times and in different cultures. For example, whereas western civilization has consistently vilified the wolf as dark, destructive and downright evil, wolf in classical Greek and Early Roman mythology is more ambivalent, and she mentioned its association with the goddess Athena as well as Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome. In North American indigenous cultures, wolf was “both beloved and celebrated” as clan name and identity, and, “as a totem animal, was called brother.” Dr. Arendell fleshed out her argument, that the wolf carries the personal shadow and that of the collective, and as such is the symbol of our (and the collective) estrangement from nature and the natural world, with sources from current and latter day naturalists such as Barry Lopez, Gary Synder, David Abram, and Henry David Thoreau. Quoting Barry Lopez, she said, “The hatred [of wolves] had religious roots… and secular roots: wolves killed stock and made man poor. At a more general level it had to do, historically, with feelings about wilderness. What men said about the one, they generally meant about the other. To celebrate wilderness was to celebrate the wolf; to want an end to wilderness and all it stood for was to want the wolf’s head.”

Those who believe that humankind’s preeminent place in the food chain gives us the right to control and dominate nature would find Dr. Arendell’s use of the wolf as the potent symbol for our estrangement from the natural world and from our inner world of psyche both provocative and naïve, and would likely question whether we are, in fact, estranged from nature and why an estrangement from nature would be a problem. They would maintain that wolves as large carnivores need to be controlled and even eradicated. They might even point to one of her sources, Gary Synder, for confirmation of their viewpoint: “Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight… [There is the] dark side of nature – the ball of crunched bones in scat, the feathers in the snow, the tales of insatiable appetite. Wild systems are in one elevated sense above criticism, but they can also be seen as irrational, moldy, cruel, parasitic.” And this, I believe, is Dr. Arendell’s central point: to be as conscious as possible requires a healing of the splits within the individual and within the collective (as mentioned earlier) and to do this requires a change in attitude, from that of duality as in “this or that” and “but and or” to one of plurality as in “both this and that.” A movement from duality to inclusiveness speaks to our ability to accept the paradoxes of life as “just so” and to shift accordingly

Giving power to an already powerful presentation were the slides of wilderness and wolves that were projected onto the theater-sized screen behind Dr. Arendell, and by the selection of her ending. The last 20 minutes or so were given to a reading of an Abenaki tale retold and illustrated by Joseph Bruchac. While his dream-like illustrations filled the screen in front of us, she told the tale of a disparate group of men, each on a wilderness journey to visit a wise man in a distant land who has the power to confer on each that which is lacking in his life. Once the gift is given, what each man does with it determines his fate and the fate of his tribe. Even before it is asked for, what is requested signifies much about the petitioner and reminded me of the adage, “be careful what you ask for – you might get it.” Dr. Arendell suggested that this tale presents “an opening into the ‘new old-new ways… as a window on one people’s relationship to the natural world… and as a window on these people’s understanding of what it means to be human.” It is also a tale that stands as a template for the journey of Individuation, that inner journey to Self that each of us is prompted to take, consciously or not; the challenges we meet along the way; the integration of our shadow so to become wholly ourselves; and the way in which we bring this self knowledge into the world.

To close this brief review of a presentation that was scholarly, passionate, and playful, I will end with a number of quotes that seem to me to most powerfully convey the essence of Dr. Arendell’s presentation:

“Modernity the period which encompasses the last four hundred years and which has accelerated at a dramatic rate in the past seventy-five, is but a blip on the temporal clock of our presence on the planet; yet, in this brief moment of human history, we’ve come to threaten not only the continuance of our own species but that of all life. Both science, with its primacy on rationalism and objectivity, and urban industrial life have widened our alienation from the natural world – contributed to its desacralization and disenchantment, and to our widespread destruction of wilderness, specifically. With the ever-increasing one-sided emphasis on thinking and agency in the outer world, we’ve pushed aside the inner world, the psyche.” – Teresa Arendell

“We’ve gone mad, stark raving mad, destroying the planet. But more specifically, we’re terminating the last 65 million years of life development. We don’t understand the earth as a sacred reality, the rivers, the mountains. The universe and in particular the planet Earth is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. If we don’t learn that, nothing’s going to work.” - Thomas Berry

“Western man has no need of more superiority over nature whether outside or inside. He has both in an almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around him and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way.” -C.G. Jung

I want to thank Dr. Arendell for not only coming to Burlington to present her work in support of the C.G. Jung Society of Vermont, but also for most graciously giving me a copy of her presentation so that I could write this review.

Dr. Arendell’s presentation was delivered on April 19th at Burlington College, Burlington, VT.

- Submitted by Stephanie Buck

MOONSTRUCK

MOONSTRUCK

Racing with the Moon, Blue Moon, Fly Me to the Moon, Moonlight Becomes You, Shine On Harvest Moon, Moon River, It’s Only a Paper Moon, Dark Side of the Moon, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, No Moon at All, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Moon Over Miami, Moon Glow, Heartless Moon, How High the Moon……… these are only hints at the impact the Moon has had on human life. By contrast, Jules Cashford’s book, The Moon: Myth and Image, published in 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, is a most comprehensive, thoroughly scholarly 400 page tome incorporating scientific facts, astronomy, astrology, etymology, ancient ‘history’, mythology and striking illustrations in an eminently readable text full of stories.

Cashford supposes it very likely that the first humans organized meaning and thought from their experience of the Moon, that it may even have been the first recorded human story as etched on rock and bone in Paleolithic time. The Moon’s story: perpetually changing from crescent to full to dark and back to crescent tells the story of birth, growth, fullness, death and rebirth and this became the human story of time as lived by all people. The author transports us imaginatively back to a time when Moon and Sun were Goddess and God, when the facts of light and dark were charged with numinosity and each phase of the Moon became a metaphor for how to order and make sense of human experience. We know from our study of mythology and anthropology that ancient religions and myths were local but they are all stories of the mysteries of life, death and hoped-for rebirth and Cashford tells many of these tales about how the Moon’s phases became linked symbolically with human life and death.

Of the many fascinating aspects of Moon which Cashford discusses, and one of the most striking for me, is her discourse on time and how early people reckoned it from the Moon. Time took on the qualities of the waxing and waning Moon so New Moons stood for beginnings and the fear of the unknown; Full Moons for fullness and the delight and intoxication of completion; Waning Moons stood for diminishment, Dark Moons for endings and mourning the death of the old and New Moons again for the beginning that always comes back, birth always following death. These notions were considered sacred as was the Moon herself (in Greek the word for New Moon is noumenia). The first calendars were devised by priests as a way of calculating festival days when no work was permitted.

Cashford posits that the ancients had a much more immediate sense of time when each phase of the Moon was valued and worshipped as time for various activities: The New Moon for anything wanted to increase (jingling coins in one’s pocket at the first sight of the New Moon so that wealth would increase); The Full Moon as a time for culmination such as sacred marriages of gods and goddesses, the coronation of royalty, weddings and the best time to give birth; the Waning Moon a time to begin only those things one wants to decrease so as to be in tune with that phase of the Moon; The Dark Moon a time for hiding and casting out devils.


The Moon has always been associated with the sea and with moisture as Cashford says here: “When the thin curve of the Crescent Moon rose as new out of the black night, it appeared to many early people to be a cup which held all the waters of life: rain, dew, the moisture of air and cloud, the water of springs, rivers and seas, the sap of plants and trees, and the blood and milk of animals and human beings.” (p.68) She quotes Oberon, King of the Faeries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he speaks of ‘young Cupid’s fiery shaft/Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon.’ (p.75) Dew has always been felt to come from the Moon and actually lies thickest on the ground on nights when the Moon is full. Until the 20 th Century in Scotland there was a custom on of gathering dew before sunrise on the morning of Beltane, May 1st and washing one’s face in it, to bring beauty to men and maidens, “healing for sore eyes and a summer of good luck to all”. (p.94) Of course the connection between the Moon and the tide is a fact. There are larger tides at the New and Full Moons when high water is higher than at other times and low water is lower. The Moon’s pull on the oceans that face it causes water to accumulate into a bulge under the Moon.

The associations proliferate: in China the Moon is called ‘the pearl of heaven’ and Dante calls the Moon ‘the eternal pearl’. So wearing pearls is like wearing a healing moon ray and the pearl in the oyster is likened to the child in the mother’s womb thus “setting the woman in the cosmological pattern of Moon, sea, water, fertility and regeneration.” (p.111)

Standing stones in Scotland and elsewhere are aligned to the rising and setting of the Moon. At Callanish in the Hebrides evidence of a potent beer together with drinking vessels has been uncovered leading to the notion that alcohol was used ritualistically in ceremonies within the great henges such as Avebury and Stonehenge.

As to the gender of the Moon, it was nearly always conceived as feminine but even when it was called masculine, according to Neumann, the dependence of consciousness and light was always on the dark, nocturnal side of life, the unconscious. So many aspects of life have traditionally been associated with the Moon: the fertility of women and animals and plants, weaving and spinning, healing, death fate, witches, the Norns, inspiration, ecstacy madness and magic. But sometime in the Bronze and Iron Ages (about 2000 BC), the purely lunar calendar changed into the lunar-solar calendar, the Sun became decidedly masculine and the Moon feminine as an expression of the archetypal change in consciousness and the consequent elevation of the masculine over the feminine in value. The Moon’s moisture was replaced by the Sun’s heat. Marduk violently slayed Tiamat, the universal Mother of All. Thus occurred the re-mythification of these major complementary opposites, masculine and feminine, with so much of the power and influence formerly held by the Moon now accruing to the Sun. This change was likely due to the discovery of agriculture which made the Sun’s light so necessary for food production; in addition the discovery that the Moon’s light is reflected Sunlight and ever increasing knowledge from science which placed the Sun at more and more distance from the Earth which was no longer the center of the universe. The rise of patriarchal religions occurred simultaneously.

It is with books like this that we may re-imagine ourselves not only back to a time when the split from Nature had not occurred, when darkness and introversion were valued, but forward to a hoped-for future where the necessary rebalancing of the values and powers of masculine and feminine lead to more balance, to the celebration of diversity and change, realizing that newness, fullness, and decrease inevitably repeat in the cycle which eternally returns.

Fly to the Moon in this book, itself a paean to Moon. I think you will enjoy the trip.

-Chessie Stevenson