This article summarizes some of the ideas in my
soon to be completed book The Dairy
Farmer's Guide to the Universe:Jung, Hermes and Ecopsychology.
The article was published in the Oregon Friends of C. G. Jung
Newsletter, Vol. 6, Issue 1, Oct. 1996-Jan. 1997 pp. 9,12, 13 and minor
revisions have been made.
Jung and the Greening of
Psychology and Education
Dennis L. Merritt, Ph.D.
I discovered the psychology of Carl Jung while
working on my Ph.D. in Insect Pathology in Berkeley in the late
sixties. I finally found someone who spoke eloquently about a psyche
that was at once beautiful, super subtle and holistic. As a naturalist
studying the biological control of insects, I was particularly
attracted to the ecological dimensions of Jung’s writings. I saw
how Jung’s deep connection to nature permeated to the core of his
psychological theories and practice. I believe that Jung will come to
be seen as the first ecopsychologist and a touchstone for ecopsychology
in the 21st century. Jung basically believed that a person is neurotic
if not connected to the land.
Jung’s
interest in alchemy and his emphasis on
the chthonic dimension of the psyche grew out of his personal
connection to nature. Being Swiss, he felt the impact of Swiss myths
and pagan rituals, some being enacted to this day. Jung spent the early
years of his life in the countryside where he established a deep
connection to the land. He was a very lonely, neurotic child who found
solace in nature, and associated it with his archetypal personality
Number Two and the pagan side of his mother. At age 3 or 4 he had a
nightmare about a ritual phallus in a cave. He experienced this as a
dark, underground god “not to be
named”. This dream
forever influenced his approach to religion and spirituality. That
dream, plus Big dreams and visions later in his life, compelled him to
study alchemy, a pursuit that had captivated some of the brightest
minds in Europe, most notably Isaac Newton. The alchemists searched for
God not in the distant heavens, but in the earth, matter, their bodies,
the feminine and sexuality. Jung’s psycho-spiritual understanding of
alchemy became the foundation and core of his theory and practice of
analysis.
Jung saw the
alchemists as the first depth
psychologists, naively projecting a post-Christian collective
unconscious into their alchemical vessels and retorts. They recognized
the true polymorphic nature of the unconscious, more commonly
illustrated by myths and fairy tales such as Grimm’s “Iron Hans,”
that Robert Bly used to establish the mythopoetic base of the men’s
movement.
The
Greek god Hermes became the god of the
alchemists since his attributes best exemplified the nature of the
unconscious. Hermes links “upward”
to his brother Apollo and “downward”
to the satyrs and nymphs. A common statue of Hermes was one of his head
atop a rectangular column bearing a phallus. This symbolized Hermes’
conscious connection to the primal, chthonic level of the psyche.
Hermes’ nymph mother, Maia, was a follower of Mnemosyne--Mother of the
Muses and goddess of Memory and mythic, oral tradition. Each god or
goddess represents a particular way of perceiving and being in the
world, a world view, a gestalt, of which they are the essence and to
which they bring their unique light. Once one has a feel for the
particular god’s realm, one can see how it is lived out in people’s
lives, in theories and in behavior patterns. Jung’s life and theories
are clearly an embodiment of the hermetic spirit. One can also
see how the Homeric myth of Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle
provides the mythic base of British psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott’s
professional life and writings on infant development. Winnicott is an
important figure in object relations theory, a system that has come to
dominate modern psychoanalytic thought.
Winnicott
focused on hermetic topics: how an
individual came into existence out of nothing; how the sense of
creativity is established in an infant from its spontaneous body
movements and sounds being mirrored by the mother; how illusion and a
sense of omnipotence is established by an archetypically devoted mother
presenting her breast at the very instant something is wanted from
within--something spontaneously arising out of hunger; how illusion and
the transitional object, such as Linus’s security blanket for example,
becomes the basis of art, religion and culture.
Hermes
as psycho-pomp, the only god to guide
souls to Hades, offers the mythic underpinnings to the Hospice
movement. The dying person’s focus turns to the body as it dies.
Hospice helps the dying process by bringing people together and
communicating with the nurses, doctors, family members and support
systems. The goal is to serve the dying person and establish a sense of
closure and meaning to life’s journey, with the hope of going on that
mythic journey described by the millions who have had near death
experiences.
Hermes
as messenger to the gods, the god of
communication that links gods to gods and gods to humans, offers the
mythic base for an interdisciplinary educational system with an
environmental focus. Every discipline, every university or college
department, has a mythic, unconscious archetypal base. Hermes, by
virtue of his inseminating seed/source of all, is what connects
everything at the deepest levels, therefore can establish links and
communication between all, beginning at the most basic levels. Hermes
sacrificed the cows equally to honor all the gods, including himself.
Many
attributes of Hermes link him to the body, more
particularly to that interim position between psyche and soma, where
archetypes become the “images of the instincts” as Jung described them.
Hermes’ son, Pan, known as the Greek god of Nature, only later became
associated with the Christian Devil. Hermes was the last god to join
the Greek pantheon and the only nymph’s son to be admitted to the
Olympic pantheon. To ancient Greek culture on the cusp of developing
philosophy, science, mathematics, etc., Hermes represents a revered
link back to the feminine, the body, nature, animism and the oral
tradition. It is a myth for our time as our culture is poised for the
creation of a post-modern, post-scientific, post-Apollonian world view.
Hermes is also the god of synchronicity, where the boundary between “inner psychic” and “outer reality” breaks down
and the Lakota-Sioux sense of “We are
all related” is experienced at a deep level.
Hermes
is an archetypal figure, a potential in
every human psyche, that can be evoked to help us in the late 20th
century to reconnect with nature. Myths and symbols, stories and art,
dreams and Hillman’s emphasis on the image, even science, can be
involved to help create and deepen our sense of the sacred in nature.
Carl Sagan
and many other scientists have come to
believe that unless we can come to see the environment as sacred, our
environment will be ruined. Only a sense of a sacred environment will
provide the foundation necessary to have the vision and political will
to change our dysfunctional relationship to nature. This is an area
where Jungian psychology can make a unique contribution.
The
weather, for example, can be related to
symbolically, since its qualities and Promethean variety metaphorically
encompass the entire domain of psychic experience. Joseph Campbell
recognized the analogy of the seasons to the human life cycle as being
the most easily recognizable, universal form of analogy. The ancient
Chinese text, the I Ching,
one of the oldest and most profound books of wisdom that dates back
before Confucius, uses many weather and seasonal metaphors to convey
its meanings.
Individuals
and therapists can use Big dreams
of animals to help cultivate a sense of the spirit animals of the
Native Americans. Jung’s concept of the psyche with his emphasis on the
spiritual and chthonic dimensions; on the psychoid dimension of
archetypes; on synchronicity and Big dreams, provides a matrix for us
to begin to understand and appreciate the world view of our Native
American brothers and sisters.
As
an entomologist I have been particularly
intrigued with Hermes’ bee oracle leading me to investigate the
symbolic significance of insects in the human psyche. Earth could be
called the Planet of the Insect, since insects are the most successful
forms of multicellular life. Their endless variety of shapes,
lifestyles and behavior reveals the very creativity in nature that we
also experience in our dreams. Insects are wonderful metaphors for the
unconscious. They are ubiquitous--virtually everywhere, from beetles
living in oil pools to survival in the frozen Antarctic. They are
usually unnoticed, but have profound effects on our lives. This
year--1996, for example, there will be a projected decrease of 30% for
the pumpkin crop in Wisconsin and 25% for apples due to the scarcity of
honey bees for pollination. Our attitudes towards insects and our
relentless drive to exterminate, even the pesty ones, reveals much
about our conquering, heroic cultural position vis-a-vis the
unconscious.
This
hermetic, Jungian, Hillmanian approach to
nature can also be applied to geographic regions to help people develop
a sense of place and root them to the land. What alerted me to
using dreams in this manner was a dream I had in Zurich shortly before
finishing my training at the Jung Institute. It is one of the simplest
and most powerful dreams I have ever had and it consisted of a simple
image. I dreamt of a typical Wisconsin meadow or pasture
scene. It was a summer field with grasses and probably
alfalfa. The typography was gently rolling. There
were some trees on the horizon, some insects in the air. It was a
beautiful sunny day with clouds in the sky. That was the dream.
But the amazing thing about the dream was that every atom and molecule
in that scene was alive, had an inner light or spirit. Although
I’ve lived in some of the most beautiful scenery in the world--in
California and Switzerland--I have never seen or experienced anything
nearly as beautiful as that typical Wisconsin pasture scene. I took the
usual Jungian approach to such a dream by allowing it to reorient
consciousness in its direction--in this case, to becoming conscious of
the sacred dimension in nature. To this end and because of my
background in dairy farming, biological sciences, ecology and as an
analyst, I take it as a personal challenge to articulate the
significant contribution Jungian psychology can make to the greening of
psychology and education.
e-mail: DLMerritt@cal.berkeley.edu
Telephone: Madison: (608)
255-9330 ext. 5
Milwaukee:
(414) 332-7400
Fax:
(608)
255-7810
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