Publications
first book
Mourning the Dream/Amor Fati
An Illustrated Mythopoetic Inquiry
The inner figure of the blind victim, the one that has the power to withstand the dark pull of the archetypal dynamic of illness/wholeness, was particularly active for a long period of time after I initially lost my eyesight.
She kept looking for what I could not see, checking each eye over and over again separately, crying out in despair to the other eye to see if it could not grasp what this one could not. As a metaphor pointing to something not seen—shadow material not identified with—the soul of my blindness kept reaching out past her claustrophobic confinement to the blackness pressing in on her.
She was relentless in her efforts to stay connected to the “not-me” that might help her learn how to see in another less literal way. I reflect now on how seeing and my sense of identity became symbiotic in that, what I could see I felt was still a part of me; I could still be whole.
I still had a relationship with these parts of my experience. And what I could not see was lost to me forever vanished as if my very sense of myself was suddenly unavailable, absent. Dead.
Talks and Presentations
The Jung society of Victoria presents:
Mourning the Dream/Amor Fati. An Illustrated Mythopoetic Inquiry
Talk, slides of art work and a small experiential activity
Mourning the Dream / Amor Fati is a mythopoetic inquiry, a narrative of the imagination which mirrors an alternate story that dwells beneath consciousness or the dominant story (individually or collectively). In that space of mirroring, we create the story as we are living it, writing the narrative at the same time as we are reading it to ourselves and to the world; we are creating a vision while seeing, an imaginative vision about what is and what can be. We are also coming to understand that mourning the dream of who we thought we were meant to be, and loving our fate, is one and the same; one cannot exist without the other. In the archetypal encounter of self and “other”—that numinous meeting we both long for and are terrified by—we enter into an alternate realm beyond the literal and into the symbolic. In the unravelling of the ego that takes
place here, the dissolving of the “I” we most identify with, lies the possibility of turning to a deeper story than the one we already know. Do I tell my story from the perspective of who I think I am? Or what I think or feel about myself? Or can I step into the narrative of this “self” that is “other”? Here I am imagining my story reflected in your story. This is where a dialogue of dreaming together emerges with both universal and highly personal questions. https://wipfandstock.com/mourning-the-dream-amorfati.html
The term mythopoetic is made up of:
Myth: of or relating to the making of myths: narrative. Self-story, life-story that explains how the world (or individual or group) and humankind came to be the way they are.
Poetic: poetry is both reflective and a language of reflexivity, the kind of aesthetic that turns around and looks back at itself.
Mythopoetic implies that the myth holds meaning in its reflexively looking back into itself. It is a story that turns around and looks back at itself through the lens of the creative process.
"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further." ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The Jung society of Victoria presents:
a Journey of Discovery into our own Birth-Death-Rebirth Archetype
Mourning what was never to be, and seizing life as it actually is, in the same moment is, a form of archetypal activism of mythopoetic dimension. It is nothing less than loving one’s fate in the face of its very mourning. Journeying into the inner mythic landscape of one’s soul through images and stories of personal myths unearths the presence of an archetypal story that lies beneath or beyond conscious thinking about oneself and the world. Myths are epic lamentings, we can draw on as teachings, to bridge the soul-split of the interruption of the birth-death-rebirth archetype. They are attempts at healing the soul-rupture caused by not honouring personal and collective trauma.
As a form, ‘myth-mapping’ mythopoetic inquiry is a witnessing and embodying of archetypal suffering, mapping our way through the images Psyche offers within each of our own myths, as footprints for us to follow her home.
This lecture is based on research findings in the doctoral dissertation “Mourning the Dream/Amor Fati: A Mythopoetic Inquiry Looking through a Spiral Lens” and includes simple mark-making and storytelling activities for participants to directly experience their own mythopoetic inquiry.
Bibliography
Jung, C. G., & McGuire, W. (1969). Archetypes and the collective unconscious. The collected works of C. G.
Jung, Vol. 9, Pt. Bollingen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kalsched, D. (2013). Trauma and the soul. A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption. New York, NY: Routledge.
Nietzsche, F. (1888). Ecco homo.—how to become what you are. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Rosen, D.H. (1993). Transforming depression. Healing the soul through creativity. 3rd Ed. New York: Putnam and Sons.