Letter from the President

Irish Journey

Dear Member,

This letter comes half way through my two-month pilgrimage to Ireland, from where I migrated to Australia ten years ago. Although I have made a few short return trips during the intervening years, this trip, with my partner and children, is the most extensive.

This holiday brings into sharp focus my ongoing search for an identity in relation to both Ireland and to Australia. On departing Ireland in 1993, I felt a sense of relief in becoming free of the restrictive rules of Irish society, for example, the negative side of Catholic mores or the unwritten rule to never get above your station in life.

I read, in an Australian magazine at that time, the similar experience of a French chef moving to Australia. He described leaving behind the shackles of French cuisine. I left behind the shackles of Irish society.

But absence makes the heart grow fonder. This trip has brought home to me the many attractive qualities of Irish life. My effusively positive comments on Irish life have elicited the view from my partner, Robyn, that I must have suffered for 10 years from repressed homesickness. Possibly.

Ireland is now a mixture of the old world and the new. A writer, whose name I forget, wrote that driving west from Dublin to Connemara is like going from the 21^st to the 19^th century. Hardly so extreme, but while many Irish are engaged in the drive to accumulate wealth, others continue to let life carry them on its mysterious journey. A foreigner interviewed about Irish life was asked to name his favourite Irish saying. He proposed the phrase: I will do it. When asked to elaborate, he said, It usually means: I wont do it. Again, an extreme view but it does refer to the tendency in Ireland for people to travel a circuitous route before arriving at a particular goal, perhaps with the goal itself transformed along the way. A couple I know, one Irish and one American, who live in Ireland wanted to find grazing for their horse. A neighbouring farmer owned a suitable field. As far as the American was concerned, why not just go and ask the neighbour? But the Irish partner was reluctant to do so and considered carefully the importance of not putting the neighbour in the awkward position of having to refuse: she realized that the neighbour might have to refuse for several reasons. In the parlance of modern counselling, the Americans approach is laudably direct. But one might also take the view that, in a world where material gain is the bottom line, the Irish partners culturally-appropriate approach showed a refreshing valuing of relationship over materialism.

Both materialism and non-materialism are a part of Irish life. Yeats recognized and despised the Irish tendency to materialism fingers fumbling in a greasy till while he also recognized, and added to the wealth of its spiritual heritage.

My identification with Ireland goes deeper than a conscious sense of our different cultures. The land itself in Ireland holds me in a more nurturing way than I can ever seem to experience in Australia. I feel I have a place with the land in Ireland, perhaps even more so than with the people. Claire Dunne, a Jungian writer in Australia, refers to a private interview with a member of the traditional Irish music group, the Chieftains. When she asked him where he thought his music came from, he replied, Directly from the land.

In Australia, David Tacey has written extensively about the evolution of spirituality among white Australians. Ones relationship to the land, the mountains, seas and lakes, he writes, is integral to a new and living spirituality. Although I often feel myself to be the only one who suffers in the struggle to find a relationship with the Australian spiritual earth, it seems that a whole generation exists in a similar space. This must apply particularly to recent immigrants like myself. For me, it is clear that I do have a spiritual relationship with the earth, particularly in Ireland. In Australia, the relationship struggles to emerge into a form that is not yet clear, even ten years on.

Unlike native Australians, I lack a language and a cultural vessel to hold my experience. For example, in Australian aboriginal culture, the soul of a new baby is welcomed into the spiritual bosom of the land and the tribe. At an imagery festival workshop last year, I experienced the beautiful ceremony of my soul being welcomed by female aboriginal elders into the care of the earth and into the care of the traditional owners of the land. In some way, that experience gave me real permission to be in Australia and, more than that, it wholeheartedly welcomed me to Australia. The experience was all the more meaningful as it represented a generous forgiveness towards me as a member of the colonising people.

The difficulty for me in relating to the red earth of Australia is complicated by my personal and cultural experiences of colonisation. In moving to Australia, I have taken advantage of the original invasion by the colonial powers. In a sense, I became part of the invasion. In Ireland, I can comfortably assume the identity of the victimised native, a member of the Irish people oppressed by the British over hundreds of years.

Yet there is much in my Irish mythological heritage that provides a link with Aboriginal spirituality. For example, Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland was formed by Cu Chulainn scooping the earth from that place and hurling it into the Irish sea where it formed the Isle of Man. Many Irish mythological stories spring in a similar way from the landscape. There are places of wisdom, of battle, of sorcery and of spirit. Our family, including daughter Maeve, aged 10, visited the tomb of Queen Maeve, a huge cairn on top of a Sligo hill and visible for miles. True or not, our guide from Duchas, the organization in charge of national monuments, told us that the ethos of modern archaeology in Ireland means that the tomb, which has never been opened, will not be excavated out of respect for the spirit of Queen Maeve. However they believe that she would have been interred in typical Celtic fashion: standing up and facing defiantly in the direction of her traditional enemies.

Irish myths are often the stories of gods and heroes who range far and wide across the island and often into the depths of the surrounding sea and even to mythical worlds beyond the sea. How similar to the aboriginal dreamtime.

I cannot neatly conclude my letter. I am too much immersed in the journey still. In my early teens, I loved the Irish myths and stories. On this trip, I visit them once again, this time in the company of Peter OConnors book Beyond the mist:: What Irish mythology can teach us about ourselves. In the book, he writes: myths function like personal dreams, bringing into consciousness a renewed awareness. To reflect on myths is not a mere intellectual exercise, it is to reflect on oneself. Jung said, I had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome I sprang.

Visiting Ireland and seeing the mountains and other places mentioned in the myths is a form of reflection that brings a feeling of almost being inside the myths, being part of them. This must be similar to the feeling of the aboriginal person towards his or her country and to the dreamtime.

Is it possible that I could ever relate in a similarly rich way to Australia? This seems to be my current quest.

Best Wishes,

Frank Coughlan

President

DEATH:  A JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE     -     Rosaleen McDade

Towards the end of his life Dr Jung was interviewed by the BBC  where he was asked if he believed in life after death.  He replied quite flatly that he did.  He stated that his reason for this belief came from observing the dreams of people who were on the verge of death.  Their dreams seemed to take no note of their approaching death.  The data was the same whether people knew that they were dying or did not know that they were about to die. Dreams continued to comment on important factors in the life of the person, such as human relationships, failure to face certain aspects of his or her life, doubts and questionings, and emotional problems.

Jung went on to say that dreams seemed to ignore death as a relatively unimportant event.  There were no indications in the dreams of dying people that an event such as the termination of life was approaching.  Their dream life seemed to convey the idea that the quality of life present during physical life would continue after death had cut them off from outer sensory communication with other individuals.  At the deepest level the psyche seems to have little concern about its continuance.  It takes continuance of its life almost as a matter of course.

 It is also important to note that dreams of death seldom refer to the actual death of any individual.  Many people who start looking at their dreams become apprehensive when they dream of seeing themselves or someone else dying, being killed, or a victim of violence.  Dreams of ones own death, however, are usually saying that some aspect or part of oneself has died or perhaps needs to die.  When we dream of  another person dying, it almost never refers to that persons death.  It again refers to an aspect of ourselves which either is dying or ought to die. These dreams seem to treat death as a symbol of rebirth and transformation.

An impressive example of death and dreams is quoted by the Jungian Analyst Morton Kelsey (1979).

The last dream in her life was that she was sitting beside her bed where her corpse was lying and she no longer sensed any gravitation or pain and was at the same time in her room as well as in a wonderful sphere of beauty, overlooking the world.  She felt happy and was very angry that she awakened from this dream again....

But what intrigues one the most is the fact that out of all the dream material I have been able to collect, no evidence is given that death from the point of view of the unconscious means the total end, but is shown as a change, a separation from ones body.  The psyche points to the realm of the pneumatic man, often shown as being above the world and in itself a world of beauty.  This at least could teach us that the ego - the psychic entity - no longer is identical with all that is identified with its worldly life and passes into a situation of totality above the world.  The psyche containing the ego as nucleus of consciousness, seems not to be touched by death as modern man mostly thinks.  We are herein confronted with a mysterium and I can only say that the unrecognizable may be experienced (p. 119).

Jung sees the human psyche as a meaningful development from an unconscious matrix toward a growing consciousness.  There seems to be an evolutionary process going on within these psyches of ours.  The universe appears to be moving toward increasing individuality and consciousness.  To see this process terminated at death seems to contradict the very nature of the universe which is revealed in us.  The growth and development of our individual psyches in the next life seems to be a continuation of the development we see among growing human beings in this life

A Personal Story

I would like to share with you my recent experience of my mothers death. 

My mother was diagnosed with cancer and I  returned to the family home and lived with her for 2 months.  Being a Jungian Christian, and a counsellor/psychotherapist for many years I was particularly aware of the issues relating to a terminal illness and death.  I respected the views and wishes of my mother and family in not wanting to talk about it much.  However, I shared about my own and others spiritual experiences, my beliefs in the afterlife from the research I had read, stories of near death experiences, my  Jungian ideas and  dream analysis work.  Of course my mother and family thought I was quite mad as do many others - except for those who share these ideas - thankfully in a place such as our Brisbane Jung Society!!  My mother listened but admitted she did not really believe in any of it and she never had dreams!!!  As the medical opinion indicated my mother had another 6-12 months, I returned to Brisbane promising that I would keep in close contact and would be back to see her again.

After about six months of regular phone calls, one evening when I  rang my mother, she was  excited to tell me about the dream she had had - she had been to that place I had told her about.  It was so beautiful and so real she did not want to come back and was angry to find herself back in the hospice bed with all her pain and trauma.  It was a mystical moment for me listening to my mothers dream and her reaction to it.  I discussed with my sisters if it was time for me to return but they assured me that the medical opinion was she had a long time to go yet.  She had entered the hospice to get her pain level monitored as the doctor was having difficulty managing her pain and to give my sister some respite as my mother had become completely immobile.  The doctors said she could not stay in the hospice any longer as she was not terminal enough!!.  They recommended  she enter a  nursing home because of the high level of care required and  the expected length of time.

 My mothers dream and my own intuition led me to think I should go regardless of  the medical opinion.  I sought advice from a couple of hospices in Brisbane, and of course they said it was impossible to give advice as every persons situation was totally different.  However, the general opinion was that my mothers psychological wish to end her pain and her acceptance of death, which I took from her dream and her reaction to it, would not hasten it. It would be the progression of her medical illness which ended her life.

Then I had a dream which I worked on with my dream group.  I interpreted this dream as my letting go of something very valuable and meaningful in my life which I linked with letting go of part of myself  with my mothers  impending  death.

I immediately arranged a flight home and rang my mother.  After a few minutes she asked me if I was coming back and I was able to tell her the day and time.  This was the first time she had asked me and I thought it very synchronistic.

My mother was moved to a nursing home and I arrived the following day.  She suffered great pain and trauma.  Three days later her doctor said her level of pain was at an acceptable level and my mother still  had quite a long time to go.  She died  the next day asking God to please help her to help herself as no-one else would. She also asked me to help her to get to that place.  What place is that, Mum?  I asked.  That place you know, Rosaleen, that place you told me about, I have been there, that place is beautiful. 

A personal thank you to all those whom I have read or listened to and who have enabled  me to believe in the power of the  psyche and dreams  and  to share the experience of  my mothers death in such a profound way.

My mother knew more than the medical opinion and so did I!!

Rosaleen McDade

11.6.03

I would love to hear anyone elses special story

E-mail dadet@austar.com.au

Reference

Kelsey, Morton (1979). Afterlife. New York, Paulist Press.

Upcoming events at the Jung Society

A Reminder and a Correction

September 27 workshop with Rosie Stave

Embracing the Shadow: Introducing The Work of Byron Katie®

will be held at Hillbrook Anglican School, 45 Hurdcotte St., Enoggera

(NOT in the Rosicrucian Hall as advertised in the last Newsletter)

Saturday September 27, 2003, 9:30 am 5:30 pm

Members and concession $70; non-members $80

Information and reservations: Krystyna (3372 2379) or Marie (3371 1285)

October 2003

Jeff Power

Damn the Rationalists . Full Dream Ahead!

Cultural story as suicide prevention

Thursday October 2, 7:30-9:30 pm, St Marys Community House, Merivale St, Cn of Peel St, South Brisbane

Members and concession: $5; non-members $10

Australia is performing brilliantly in economic terms but failing in social terms. Our greatest threat is from ourselves, not from terrorist attacks. Is it possible to re-vision our culture in a way that energizes us with a sense of collective purpose in order to tackle the many complex social issues amongst us? This talk will offer some possible ways forward.

* The role and function of cultural story in individual lives;

* The way cultural story works like a dream in the background;

* The rise and dominance of Rationalism as a particularly limiting cultural story;

* How Rationalism has stultified creativity from politics to psychology;

* How Rationalism has rendered good willed people bewildered and powerless in the face of many social issues including depression and suicide;

* The suicidal impulse as a partial desire for a transformation beyond the limits of rationalism;

* Suicide and terrorism as cultural shadow;

* The role of the Death Experience in individuals and culture;

* The surprising emergence of a New Cultural Story or Dreaming across many disciplines;

* The Ecological Self as the goal of transformation.

This talk will draw together groundwork that has already been done in the fields of Spirituality, Jungian Psychology, Mythology, Film and Literature. Concrete steps will be put forward towards a New Cultural Dreaming that places spirituality at the heart of culture and affirms current work in suicide prevention. 

Jeff Power is a therapist in private practice consulting with individuals, couples and organizations. Up until recently he was the Manager of Telephone Counselling Services at Lifeline Gold Coast. He is currently completing a Masters of Analytical Psychology (Jungian Studies) at the University of Western Sydney. In his spare time he dreams of being a fish in water and not feeling like a fish out of water.

Upcoming events at the Jung Society

November 2003

Sarah Dunk

Jungian Reflections on the White Migrants Sense of Place in Australia

Thursday evening November 6, 7:30 9:30 pm.

 St Marys Community House, Cn Merivale and Peel St, South Brisbane

Cost: Members and concession: $5; non-members $10

Drawing upon two patients' material, Sarah will be reflecting upon the challenges facing the white migrant population in finding a sense of Self and Place in Australia. She will consider the unconscious defences in the Australian psyche against the pain of rootlessness, and the search for a 'white fellas dreaming'.

Sarah Dunk has been qualified as an analytic psychotherapist for 15 years. She is currently practising in Lismore, northern NSW. She completed her training, which included an eight year Jungian analysis, and supervision in the UK. Apart from maintaining a private practice, Sarah regularly teaches on the theory and practice of psychoanalytic thought and is keen to apply analytic understanding to cultural events.  

.December 2003

Leon Petchkovsky

Jung and the Dreaming

Jung and the Dreaming: analytical psychology's encounters with Aboriginal culture. An ethnopsychiatric perspective, by Leon Petchkovsky, Craig San Roque and Manita Bescow

Thursday December 4, 7:30-9:30 pm

St. Marys Parish House, Merivale St, Cn Peel St., South Brisbane

Members and concession $5; non-members $10

This presentation is based on a paper published in the recent Jungian edition of the International Journal of Transcultural Psychiatry (June 2003), which reviews some contributions from the Jungian analytic tradition to indigenous ethnopsychiatric thought in Australia. (Copies will be available from the C. G. Jung Society of Queensland). The authors review Jung's writings on Aboriginal culture, then describe some of their own field-work findings.  Acknowledging that the contemporary post-Jungian tradition is pluralist, they propose a notion of "Jungian sensibility". They discuss some of the ways in which the "Jungian sensibility" might contribute positively to Aboriginal mental health, with especial reference to "theories of subjectivity", and note that some Aboriginal people find the Jungian world-view very compatible with the Aboriginal one.

Leon Petchkovsky MB BS FRCPsych PhD is a graduate of Sydney University Medical School and a Senior Specialist in Psychiatry. He is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry with the University of Queensland. He works primarily in the Public Sector as Consultant to the Extended Care (Rehabilitation) programme at Robina Hospital, and is also Director the Psychotherapy Programme GCIMHS. He trained as a Jungian analyst in London, with the late Dr Irene Champernowne, who was renowned for her annual Zurich Institute lectures series on Art Therapy (the Pictures from the Unconscious series). He has spent many years in Central Australia with his colleague Dr Craig San Roque, working with indigenous mentors.

JUNG AND CHRISTIANITY   -  By  Rosaleen McDade

Carl Jung could well be hailed as one of the greatest apologists for Christianity the twentieth century has produced.  He could equally well be dismissed as one of its greatest heretics.  Jung's conflicts with theologians are legendary.  They fill many pages of the two volumes of his collected letters and are never far from the surface in his extensive writings on the psychology of religion (Dourley, 1981, p. 7).  He understood his work to be in the defence and service of the religious nature of man, a nature he sought to portray as a wealthy source of living symbols including the Christian ones.  He hoped to provide the Christian with a deeper appreciation of his own symbols by demonstrating their source in the deeper reaches of the psyche.  By thus showing the believer his continuity with the universal expressions of the human spirit both prior to and beyond Christianity, Jung sought to give new life and relevance to what often becomes dead dogma.  Yet his views are widely offensive to the collective Christian consciousness.

The reality of religion, Jung affirms, is embedded in the fabric of the human soul, and that it finds inevitable expression in the consciousness that arises from such depths.  As such, religion cannot be eradicated from the human condition.  He contends that the reality of religion, when it loses its specifically religious trappings, reappears in the guise of political, social or philosophical and cultural notions.  He had an equally clear perception of the ambiguous nature of religion itself and a conviction that it could kill as well as enliven, split as well as heal, and fragment as well as make whole.  In his eyes man was not faced with the choice of being religious or irreligious.  His only real option was his free and responsible facing and coming to terms with the religion-engendering forces within his life.  These forces might appear as obviously religious or they might appear in the compelling attractions of the apparently nonreligious dimensions of life.  But appear they would and with the force of the suprahuman, with the force of the gods.  The only question then, was not whether man would be approached by the divine in life but whether his response to its approach would destroy or support him.

Personal Experience of God

Jung's concern for the spiritual needs of his time led him to call for a restoration of the sense and meaning of religion itself and for a consciousness that could again appreciate and respond to the symbolic, the native language of religion, as the two major preconditions for the revitalization of religion in any of its positive manifestations including Christianity.  This sense of religion, Jung argued, could be restored only if man could regain his experience of himself as an image of God.  This recovery for Jung meant a heightened experience of the immediate presence of God to human consciousness and being.  Psychologically, for Jung this meant the identification and recognition of those structures and forces within the psyche from which man's experience of God both could and has to arise. The experience of the deep recesses of the psyche within life is the basis of a humane perception of God beyond life.  The sense of divine indwelling is the basis for man's sense of a transcendent God.  Jung argues that the God hidden in man's unconscious becomes incarnate through human consciousness and in so doing revitalizes, balances, and enlarges life, even as the symbols of death and resurrection are most apt to describe the dynamics of this interaction.

The self is the centering force within the psyche which brings together the opposites or polarities whose dynamic interplay makes up life itself.  The greatest of these polarities are consciousness and the unconscious.  The nature of these polarities, when functioning in creative reciprocity, is to produce a centre of the personality, a self, which is neither the ego nor the unconscious but the product of their union.  From one perspective the self precedes the unity of ego and unconscious and works to bring it about.  From another perspective it is the result of the unity of ego and unconscious.  In this sense it exists from the outset of life but is only achieved, and then only approximately, at the end of the process (p. 17)

 Jung's psychological perspective points to the genesis of all religious experience in an experience of the numinous, grounded in the impact of the collective unconscious on the ego.  He is describing the imprint of the divine on the human.  In Jung's more measured treatment of the origin of the numinous, he points only as far as the apparently inexhaustible capacity of the unconscious to throw up discernibly similar images of God on a consistent and universal basis.  Jung grounds this capacity in the archetypes of the collective unconscious.  In so doing he confines himself to the empirical evidence derived from patterns of images that point to a common origin.  He absolves himself from speculation on the actual existence of God, though in less guarded moments he hints that the archetypes themselves may penetrate to the very ground of the universe.