The emotional bond between humans and the earth is not a new subject. yet, as we face a critical juncture in our civilisation, the gulf between the psychological and the ecological remains prevalent in industrial cultures. Jonathan Fordham shows how deepening connection and returning to the archetypal can help us.
“Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature, that we are different from Nature? No, we are in Nature and think exactly like Nature.”
Carl Jung
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
Shakespeare
In classical Greek mythology, jealous of her considerable beauty, Aphrodite sets Psyche a series of seemingly impossible tasks: The Task of the Seed – to sort out a roomful of assorted grains before nightfall; The Task of the Golden Fleece – to bring a hank of wool from a flock of man-eating sheep; The Task of the Black Fountain – to fill a jug with water from the River Styx, which divides the living from the dead; and The Task of the Casket – to obtain a casket containing the gift of beauty from Proserpine, the queen of the underworld.
An intuitive connection with Nature herself helps to achieve the first three tasks. A colony of friendly ants divide the grains into piles for Psyche; a reed informs her when it is safe to take the wool while the sheep sleep in the afternoon; while an eagle fetches the water from the inaccessible mountains of the Styx; in the fourth, in the aftermath of the most difficult task, after opening the casket which contained not beauty but deadly sleep, Psyche is found by Cupid and brought back to life, culminating in her being given a drink of nectar by Jupiter, making her immortal. The deeper layers of the story, already rich and resonant with archetypal elements, portray the testing of love between Cupid and Psyche through a series of ordeals, show the intrinsic power of Nature, and demonstrate that love triumphs over death.
The word ‘Psyche’ is Greek for soul, life, breath; we may understand psyche as being Nature itself. Since the 1960s, when Robert Greenway began teaching psychoecology, how the mind and nature interact has long been a growing interest in the field of therapy, bringing together psychological healing and awareness of a deepening environmental crisis, with ecotherapy arguing that our suffering arises out of broken relationships with the natural world – our disconnection from the other than human.
Psychology and ecology came together further in the early 1990s at a San Francisco conference, with deeper conversations beginning between therapists and environmentalists. Theodore Roszak coined the term ‘ecopsychology’ in 1992 in The Voice of the Earth, where he addressed Westernized industrial culture’s “longstanding, historical gulf between the psychological and the ecological”. Shortly after, in 1995, the anthology Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind brought together different voices ranging from Native American perspectives on dislocation, to grief and despair about environmental destruction, to Jungians writing about the collective unconscious.
Now, as postmodernism gives way to the next age, something more is needed. Severan, who calls the emerging cultural movement metamodernism, writes: “We live in strange times. The climate grows unstable, institutions are failing, coalitions are shifting, and the whole geopolitical order, long held together by ‘American influence’, is collapsing. People are starved for transcendence and the means of identity-construction it affords. Without a more solid edifice, cults proliferate, conspiracy theories abound, speaking to a hunger for sense and meaning in the rubble of postmodernism.” 1
In these strange times, from where shall we discover the “solid edifice” needed for this transition? It is here that the founder of analytical psychology ‘Carl Jung’ can help us…
In her introduction to The Earth has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life, Meredith Sabini alludes to a dream Jung had in 1909 of a multi-story house. The floors above ground represent recent historical periods; its foundation, the evolutionary history and relationships between groups (phylogeny, which informs his split with Freud), rather than individual organisms of our species. From this dream, Jung developed the idea of a collective unconscious.
Does this move towards the “solid edifice” which we need? Jung reminded us that consciousness itself is a blessing and a curse. “We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness – our Promethean conquest – may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature.”2 Jung put it another way: “Discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.” 3.
In my work as a therapist I often reflect that my experience of therapeutic process is entirely about connection: from the primacy of the therapeutic alliance, or what I call ‘the encounter’ (as renowned psychotherapist Irvin Yalom wrote: ‘It’s the relationship that heals; it’s the relationship that heals; it’s the relationship that heals); to the sense and meaning I try to help clients make of childhood experiences, relating it to how they consequently psychologically relate to people and to the world; to promoting mindfulness and meditation; to developing gratitude; to discovering creativity from within; to understanding Polyvagal Theory, developed by Daniel Segal, so that we can move through embodied trauma states back to calm: Connection is who we really are before symptoms or psychological, egoic adaptions occurred. A contemporary of Jung, the depth psychologist Fritz Kunkel, defined egoism as “wanting happiness regardless of the welfare of others”: the very opposite of connection.
The goal must be connection, on every level.
Robert Johnson, author and Jungian psychoanalyst, said: “Nothing will see us through the age we’re entering but high consciousness. We don’t have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one. Each age needs its own language for understanding enduring truths. The ancient world didn’t have much of what we call reality; they lived, instead, by the slender threads. We have gained ego reality, but have lost the mystical and religious functions that should guide our lives.” 4.
Johnson also wrote: “Dr Kunkel’s teacher, Dr Jung, believed that archetypes are blueprints of the basic qualities we all share. The archetypes themselves are undefinable natural patterns or forces that shape life in all ages and places. They cannot be known directly, but archetypal themes and images appear in myth, fairy tales, dreams, and fantasies. We tend to think of ourselves as unique individuals, and to a great extent we are. But just as there are shared patterns that shape our physical existence, such as having two arms and legs, two eyes, ten fingers and toes, so there are underlying patterns that shape our psychic existence.” 5. By incorporating wisdom from the depths of the psyche, from the “solid edifice”, Jung reaches not only our informed, psychologically complex modern mind, but simultaneously the aspect of our being that is ancient, primitive, original.
Unlike Psyche we are tasked not by a jealous Aphrodite, or an angry God. We face the bitter harvest of our collective cultural dissociation. It may be that we need stories from the ancestral hearth to remind us of who we are, to create possibilities for connection, awakening, and renewal, to create that myth – simultaneously ancient and modern – that may yet draw us back from the precipice so-called advanced consciousness and technological progress have taken us to the brink of.
Read more of Jonathan Fordham’s articles in Sublime
Citations:
1. Severan, A. Metamodernism and the Return of Transcendence, edited Brendan
Graham Dempsey, 2022
2. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, para 750
3. C.G. Jung Letters, 1, p.537+
4. and 5. Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations
