talks
on creativity and the mythic return to origins University of Dallas, September 2019
Book discussion group
Starting August 11, 2019. See specifics and email signup form below. About the series Audience The book and discussion will likely benefit most those who engage in some regular creative practice and have some interest and/or familiarity with Jungian psychology. Every attempt will be made to address disparities in the latter among group members. If …
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, …
How music heals
Trees are constantly growing. When a limb is cut off the tree grows around the cut to seal the wound against disease. In nature, healing is an extension of the capacity for generativity or growth. Another angle: The psychologist D.W. Winnicott writes that when children play they are becoming who they are. Like a plant …
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 …
What the body knows
A friend reported the following experience: “Being an empath can be an odd thing…I was introduced today to an art exhibit photo of two wall clocks hung side-side-side and synchronized.(1) I was asked what I thought it was about. I teared up and cried, with no idea as to why. I didn’t feel any emotion …