talks
on creativity and the mythic return to origins University of Dallas, September 2019
Reading Jung: Psychology as Art
I first read Jung in an introductory class taught by Robert Romanyshyn. His instruction for our reading was to take up Jung’s practice of hospitality toward psyche by noticing our reactions and journaling them. I now understand that the attitude of hospitality lives in Jung’s writing as an invitation to the same. Embracing the invitation, …
“Shrink!” The constriction of creative imagination
Slang for therapist, shrink is an intriguing word; rather it is a fascinating image. One story goes that it arose from phrenology, the study of head size and shape and its correlation to personality. You go to a shrink to have your head examined and undesirable qualities shrunk. That’s one way the image plays out. …
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Language embodies imagination
Language embodies imagination; its diastole and systole, its expansion and constriction. Our proclivity for constricting imagination by turning everything into literal noun-things lives in grammar. To see how this plays out, let’s track how the phrase ‘the unconscious’ can open to imagination or turn what began as an experience into a thing. Some emerging psychological …
Music, language of the soul: melody and harmony
The arts, including music, are the soul’s languages. Music connects with us (and connects us) because it speaks the soul’s language, whose very syntax embodies its source. In melody and harmony we find image and incarnation of the soul. Melody is the story line of a song. The melodic line is a thread that holds the song …
creative by nature: the tree on a hill
There on a grassy hill stood a tree, old, vibrant, captivating in its beauty. People of all sorts traveled the country road that wrapped around the base of the hill. A carpenter walked by, looked up and looked long at the oak. Sizing up how it had grown, he surmised that, properly cut and dried, …
an example of being figured by the work
in the essay, “the dream-ego in the dream, the waking-ego in creativity,” i write of how we (in this case, composer, performers and audience) are figured by the creative work. Here is a stark example. Background for the Rouse composition from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odna_Zhizn Christopher Rouse’s 2009 composition Odna Zhizn (Russian for “a life”) is what …
the dream-ego in the dream, the waking-ego in creativity
JSSS Conference presentation Robert Sandford, M.A., June, 2018 In this talk, the dream-ego in the dream, the waking-ego in creativity, we will entertain the central image of a chapter of the same name from my upcoming book, A Jungian Approach to Engaging Our Creative Nature. Hillman writes in Healing Fiction (p.80), that Jung’s technique of …
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rhythm
Why does Music have such an effect on us? Where does it come from? In the beginning, there was rhythm. In our mother’s womb we hear the beating of her heart and the rhythm of her breath. We feel the stillness and movement and the sleeping and waking of her days. We are born into …
what makes a space sacred
The spaces we dwell in have a powerful effect on us. Moving from our parking lot toward the church we enter into community. The doors open to welcome us. The narthex is a passage into fellowship and a prelude to prayer. Anticipation is in the very air held within those walls. Grasping the handles of …
love, freedom and creation
What if we are so much of creation that the gift of free will, given in love, had consequences for all creation? “…for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption …
why heaven is up
Of course we’re not talking literally “up.” That would lead to all sorts of absurdities. We’re speaking metaphorically, which is to say that we’re speaking psychologically. So how do we get at the meaning of the metaphor? – by playing with it until we begin to see through it as through a lens and by …
transformative ideas
“Perhaps ideas are the single most precious miracle in human existence. For ideas determine our goals of action, our styles of art, our values of character, our religious practices and even our ways of loving.” -James Hillman, Kinds of Power p. 16 The experience of a taking in a transformative idea Coming across an idea …
reimagining memory
While we may imagine memory as the collection and recall of facts, compared with technologies we create to help us remember facts, we are actually quite poor at factual recall. We forget far more than we remember and often what we remember and how we remember it is considered suspect. We have learned to create …
group mind V: connection to the audience
Related posts group mind I: like conversation group mind II: transcendence group mind III: the nature of music group mind IV: chemistry group mind V: connection to the audience Insight: For every ensemble, whether in rehearsal or in performance, there is always present, their audience. Always at issue in every rehearsal and every performance is …
group mind IV: chemistry
Related posts group mind I: like conversation group mind II: transcendence group mind III: the nature of music group mind IV: chemistry group mind V: connection to the audience Insight: When an ensemble really gels and their performance is organic and alive, you’ll hear “That band has great chemistry.” “Chemistry,” is so essential and is …