Dennis Slattery

Abstract Jonah Lehrers Proust Was a Neurosdentist explores the works of writers, a painter, a chef, and a musician in order to discover what areas of neuroscience were imbedded in their creations. While engaging the workings of memory, his study also interrogates the potential for metaphors to anticipate literal realities in neuroscience. Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid explores the invention and history of the first alphabets in three cultures as well as the profound shifts in brain physiology both writing and reading have created in the human mind. Her work also explores reading obstacles such as dyslexia and other forms of impediments that make both reading and writing major blocks to individuals.

It is very early in the morning. The sky, full of darkness, is peppered with the white glow of stars as the Trappist monks gather, their routine each morning, as they have for 900 years, to sing the Psalter, from the Old Testament Psalms. They follow the Gregorian chant singing of ...

The psyche is fundamentally mimetic, metaphoric, and meaning-directed. From Aristotle's Poetics, in which mimesis is defined, to the discoveries of neuroscience today, with its exploration of “mirror neurons,” the imagination's impulse is to create analogies of experience. Poetry especially reveals that events in our lives are given an order and coherence in language to create a representation of that event in an aesthetic form. “Psychopoetics” may be a useful term to designate how the psyche makes meaning of an event by offering a narrative, an extended metaphor, to reveal the inner sleeve of the event through an energy transfer from the event to a form of “affective presence.” Using several of my own poems as illustrations, this exploration attempts to give language to the translation from a lived event to an aesthetically formed experience in poetic form. Such a creative process of aesthetic expression can evoke feelings of compassion and social justice.

B efore seeing Ron Howard’s new film based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (2000), I pulled his book off my shelf and saw that I had read it in September of 2001. I remember the excitement of reading the backstory that influenced Herman Melville’s historical imagination as he crafted his epic of America, Moby-Dick (1851), and so looked forward with anticipation to seeing Howard’s film adaptation of Philbrick’s National Book Award winner. I was excited about the former but found no real charge in the latter. To be sure, I saw it in both regular format and 3-D versions. It did not help. I suppose it is always a risk to turn history into myth by changing historical facts to oblige an imaginal fiction. Howard tries but without great success. He stays with the facts surrounding the New England whale ship Essex, commanded by George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and the first mate, Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), and highlighting the cabin boy...

ABSTRACT Patrick Mahaffey’s Integrative Spirituality: Religious Pluralism, Individuation, and Awakening is a sophisticated and deeply considered series of relationships between Jungian and archetypal psychology and several religious traditions and practices, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Yoga as well as contemplative and mystical ways of being and seeing. The overriding concern and focus of the book is the “cultivation of interiority” as a major path to awakening people to their full potential and humanity in the world. In drawing on his own numinous experiences early in life, Mahaffey began a quest that, while including his Catholic background, nonetheless extended out to Eastern traditions and their practices that encourage awakening as well as into the depth of Jungian thought to bridge the gap between psyche and spirit. His study ends with a chapter that reveals his own daily spiritual/psychological meditations that encourage his further awakening.

ABSTRACT It is one form of experience to study Greek myths and Greek gods through books, articles, journals, and film; it is another to be visited by any of them and, in this case, the god Dionysus, through disease. The article focuses less on sources of the god and more on the experience of his presence in illness and in surgeries that respond to his presence. During the author’s illness and slow recovery in April 2017 and continuing into the present day, he realized what the early Greeks had written about Dionysus as one who intrudes into one’s life, dismembers one’s normal ways of being, and then offers re-membrance once he is acknowledged and responded to. While Dionysus both dismembers and heals, so too the god Apollo and his son Asklepios are both healers and purifiers. Jung’s own thoughts on Dionysus and Apollo are presented here; for him these two gods serve as polarities and as complements to the psyche’s full range of experiences surrounding wounding, infection, affliction, and healing. The author believes there is a cost to the visitation by these gods that may alter one’s life and identity permanently. Such is the power of divinities that the Greeks have given us as a legacy of their own sense of the soul in sickness and in health.

ABSTRACT Thomas Cattoi and David M. Odorisio co-edit a volume of essays that explore where depth psychology and mysticism as well as mystical experiences find convergences and divergences. The richly varied essays are gathered under three territories: Part I: Methodological, Hermeneutic, & Inter-disciplinary Perspectives; Part II: Historical & Theoretical Approaches; and Part III: Self and No-Self, Knowing and Unknowing in Depth Psychology & Mysticism. One of the central aims of the study by scholars in both fields is to discern the outlines of a new hermeneutic to more fully illuminate both fields individually as well as where they meet together in conversation. The interdisciplinary approach opens areas of inquiry that might not surface in a separate study of each area individually. Another of its aims is to question current boundaries between the two disciplines and to ask where in each field may the assumptions and beliefs no longer hold up, where false dichotomies still exist, and where and under what conditions in each field is a concerted effort of revisioning due.

ABSTRACT Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, stretches from the thoughts of Martin Luther in the sixteenth century to the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. In between these two periods, the book explores major moments in several decades of American history, beginning in the seventeenth century, to reveal the energies, forces, and inventions that brought America to its current disposition, wherein fact and fiction blend to such an extent that one cannot be distinguished from the other. With the invention and rise of the individual and individualism, a shared tradition was lost in favor of each person creating his or her own version of reality, one that pleases, comforts, and reinforces the individual’s beliefs, no matter how outrageous, harmful, and dangerous. The dramatic change in America’s sense of itself is accelerating in its metamorphosis into a further agglomerate of what Christopher Lasch wrote of in 1978: a culture of narcissism. Fantasyland is the domain of narcissism writ large. Yet Andersen’s final image is one of hope: that we have peaked in the land of fantasy and can begin to recover a shared sense of values not predicated on individualism or private perspectives but on the earlier idea of “the common good.”

ABSTRACT Evans Lansing Smith’s edited volume on The Romance of the Grail gathers an enormous number of writings that mythologist and historian Joseph Campbell created over a lifetime of study of the Grail Legend and the epic poems of the Middle Ages, which rendered this theme in a variety of rich poetic expressions. Smith traces many of the writers on myth, history, and philosophy who influenced Campbell’s imagination. In dividing his study into three distinct parts, beginning with “Foundations and Backgrounds of the Grail Romances,” which includes studies of Neolithic, Celtic, Roman, and German backgrounds as well as others, he then develops in Part Two the principle knights and their respective quests from a host of epics that span roughly a hundred years. Part Three then shifts to the major themes and motifs that comprise the Wasteland theme, including a rich survey of “Enchantment and Disenchantment,” “The Anointed King,” “The Wound,” “The Grail,” and “Avalon.” Two appendices include Campbell’s master’s thesis submitted to Columbia University in 1927, as well as a rich list of works on the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages. Smith includes many provocative insights by Campbell on how to read myths as metaphors for psychic and emotional insights to help the reader see their relevance in his or her own quest through life.

On Rossi's Goddesses (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. In the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, edited by Safron Elsabeth Rossi. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013. 304 pp. ISBN: 1608681823. Cloth $24.05.The Eternal feminine is what draws us on.-GoetheOne of a number of critiques that continues to swirl around Joseph Campbell's massive library of books he has published (and now available on DVD) is that he appears to leave the feminine out of the Hero's Journey. Some of his readers have gone so far as to suggest that he leaves the feminine out of the mythic pantheon that he constructed over a lifetime of exploring world mythologies.In this new book, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, much of such criticism might be muted or modulated or, at the very least, revisited and revised. The editor, Dr. Safron Rossi, a former mythological studies student at Pacifica Graduate Institute and now curator of the OPUS Archives and associate core faculty member at the institute, has performed a magnificent service in both idea and execution by gathering Campbell's lectures, essays, and informal talks into one volume. In its 300 pages, the volume celebrates Campbell's abiding and enduring interest in and fascination with the Goddess tradition, its mythohistorical legacy, and its voice in literary classics of the Middle Ages.The eight substantial and often beautifully illustrated chapters, with artworks that include ceramics, paintings, sculptures, reliefs, engravings, and sketches from around the globe, gather a range of feminine divine presences across time and space. For example, consider the following: "Chapter 1. Myth and the Feminine Divine"; "Chapter 2. Goddess-Mother Creator: Neolithic and Early Bronze Age"; "Chapter 4. Sumerian and Egyptian Goddesses"; "Chapter 6. Iliad and Odyssey: Return to the Goddess"; "Chapter 8. Amor: The Feminine in European Romance." The brief appendix contains Campbell's foreword to Marija Gimbutas's Language of the Goddess as well as a list of "Essential Reading" on the Goddess's presence in a variety of disciplines.As many readers of Campbell's ample corpus know, he is a comparative mythologist who works best within what I would call the "analogical imagination." He seeks similarities within forests of difference; words that I have found to describe his "mythodology" include "in accord with," " similar to," "like," and "corresponds to," to name a few. His method calls to mind C. G. Jung's provocative insight that "analogy formation is a law which to a large extent governs the psyche" (par. 414). Campbell generally adheres to this principle as a guide through the whirling motions of world mythologies over time. The other staple to his method is his understanding of myths as energy fields, even transport vehicles, that allow the individual and culture to move to a place where one or both may become transparent to transcendence. His move is always toward the invisible but palpable presences that undergird and give shape and form to the time-bound phenomenal world. In his imagination, the images of the Goddess have served humankind in just that way for millennia, however much they seem to have been lost, deconstructed, or decentered from the individual or collective psyche: "The object venerated," he asserts, "is a personification of an energy that dwells within the individual, and the reference of mythology has two modes-that of consciousness and that of the spiritual potentials within the individual" (14).Furthermore, as we track his phenomenological exploration of Goddess imagery, we recognize him working the image as one would the imagery of a poem. In fact, it is well to recall his fundamental belief of the Goddess's presence: "People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all-she's the muse. She's the inspirer of poetry. She's the inspirer of the spirit" (37). Most always, what myths lead Campbell to repeatedly proclaim is that they are manifestations in time and space of the timeless realm of spirit. …

T he grand epics in history—for example, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Commedia, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Toni Morrison’s Beloved—reconnect us collectively with the past and with the shaping myth that gave that period of history its ground in the form of its beliefs and values to sustain it. Epics retrieve, renew, and refresh the myth, dust it off and send it back out in the world. Epics, then, are a people’s grand recollections that allow them to remember who and what they are and wish to be. Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven is epic in these terms stated, but it is also a tragic rather than comic epic, as I will illustrate. In addition, it is also one of the most beautifully filmed movies in this genre’s history, thanks to the genius of Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler’s creative cinematography. Set in 1916, the film relates the story of Bill (Richard Gere), a young steel worker in Chicago, who, in an altercation with his foreman (Stuart Margolin), kills him with a steel pipe. He then flees with his girlfriend, Abby (Brooke Adams), who they pretend is his sister, and his real younger sister, Linda (Linda Manz), who also narrates the story from her young, limited, but often grand and perceptive perspective. The three ride the trains, with hundreds of others seeking work, to the wheat fields in the Texas Panhandle and become part of the massive migration of Americans willing to remain homeless but working, in this case as wheat harvesters, in order to survive. Their travels from America’s industrial, soot-laden, and poverty-drenched cities to the rural beauty of the farm is itself an epic journey where all are striving to endure, harvest America’s crops, and then move nomadically to the next opportunity to earn money. But when the terminally ill farmer (Sam Shepard) who owns the fields and a lonely, stately home sitting by itself on the prairie falls in

... Cover photo of Big Sur, California, by Dennis Patrick Slattery ... Aizenstat 9 A Note from the Editors 18 Chapter 1–The Contemplative Self The Spiritual Journey and Therapeutic Work by Charles Asher 21 Chapter 2–Creativity as an Archetypal Calling by Dianne Skafte 33 Chapter ...

Abstract Dennis Patrick Slattery , “The Subtle Power of Silence,” Review of Robert Sardello's Silence. Benson, North Carolina: Goldenstone Press, 2006, Jung Journal: culture & psyche, 1:4, 72-76. Traditionally, silence has been understood as the absence of noise or equated with quiet. Robert Sardello, therapist, spiritual director, and poet of the soul, sees such designations as actually suffocating silence. His study, with co-author Cheryl Sanders-Sardello, reimagines Silence from the perspectives of depth psychology, religious spiritual traditions, therapy, as well as phenomenology. His work uncovers the complex, repetitive, spiralic, and healing powers of silence, its essential place as a third element in human relations and a productive force that opens one to the potentially creative aspect of one's own being. Death forces, by contrast, in the form of consumer culture, prepackage life and experience to be consumed, not lived creatively. Sardello's book has far-reaching implications for therapy, education, and politics to name a few.

AbstractDennis Patrick Slattery, “The Quantum Psyche: Spirit Matters Between Pauli and Jung,” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 2005, 24:3, 29- 34. Review of David Lindorff, Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds, Wheaton, Ill, Quest Books, 2004. David Lindorff's study explores and defines a fine friendship between Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung. The basis of this intimate relation is the quantum physics that Pauli helped to pioneer and the sustained interest of Jung in psyche's extended range in matter and in spirit. It is as well a study in synchronicity, for both men, each in his own respective field, seemed to have found the same material and psychic groove in which to uncover some basic structures of the psychological and physical worlds. Lindorff tracks with ease and precision the contours of these respective terrains and, in so doing, offers a portrait of both men in the form of a more intimate form of communication: letter writing. The reader sees thereby a less guarded, mor...

AbstractSlattery, Dennis Patrick, “The Powers of Analogy: Painting and Poetry as Corridors to Individuation,” The San Francisco Jung institute Library Journal, 2006, 25:4, 49-60. A review of Katherine M. Sanford's The Serpent and the Cross: Healing the Split through Active Imagination. Expressions of one's personal journey of individuation can take many forms. In Jungian analyst Katherine Sanford's story, it took the form of active imagination in which dreams and conversations accompanied 62 archetypal paintings over a period of approximately 30 years. Her story, depicted primarily in the paintings, is revealed through images of animus, earth mother, ego woman, natural woman, mandalas, gardens, serpents, reptiles, dragons, all commented on by the author as different accents of her own psyche. The reader is invited to participate by analogy in the author's richly tapestried journey to heal the mother wound she carried for so many years, into adulthood.

... abstract Susan Rowland's CG Jung in the Humanities (2010) retraces many of Jung's major preoc-cupations as a writer and thinker in light of ... Studies of spe-cific works of literature such as Shakespeare's Hamlet and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex illumi-nate the way art is mimetic of ...

Abstract Review of: James Hillman, City and soul, Putnam, Connecticut: Spring Publications, Inc., 2006. The second volume of The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman compiles talks, essays, and lectures over a thirty-year period on the city and the soul of culture. Taken together, these entries outline an aesthetic and imaginal psychology that extends the seminal work of C. G. Jung and develops many of his tenets through a fuller consideration of the mythic, the metaphoric, and the imaginal qualities of soul. Its audience is not just psychologists but any intelligent layperson interested in current cultural phenomena as well as in a further grasp of what crucial place the imagination occupies in the shaping of the city as a psychological place.

... and utility, which first peeled its rubber into the historical domestic zone of America to converse with myth, on July 4, 1947, in Hollister, California ... and raced up and down the tiny town's main drag (San Benito Street) rather than watch races being held at a nearby park (Alford and ...

Dennis Patrick Slattery, “Orphic Grief: Metaphor and the Haunting Therapy of Loss,” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 23, 37–47. Robert Romanyshyn’s work as a therapist, teacher and poetic spirit has cultivated rich and original connections between depth psychology, poetry, and the value of metaphor in the life of the individual and the cultural life of the soul. Two books, Mirror and Metaphor: Images and Stories of Psychological Life and Ways of the Heart: Essays Toward an Imaginal Psychology, gather his thoughts on grief, the orphan, the angel, the poetic responses of psyche, and the value of homecoming. Basic to his understanding of psychological life is the act of reverie, which illuminates the invisible presences within the visible phenomena of the world.