Ch 1 Process Arts - pre-pre-rough draft of the first part

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Ch 1 Process Arts

Clear Boundaries
Origins in unconsciousness
Definition
Location
Coming into concert
Coming into conflict
Coming to consciousness
Exclusions
Effect
Concrete
Focus on Re-visioning (as in archetypal psychology)
Mythological
Archetypal
Dialogical
Authenticity
Systemic maturity
conscious of metaphor
subtle of thought or flexible
sustainable as a discipline, ie one of the Humanities

Ch 1 Process Arts

All aspects of the thematic, formalist, and functionalist arguments [regarding the meaning of myth] seem to be relevant to literary studies. Mythological references in literature establish our psychological origins, or the structure of the collective unconscious. They can be said to reveal binary structures of thoughts, or fantasy-dislocation or problem-reflection. They may ironically prefigure literary meaning, or act as the primary language of experience. In addition to these thematic variations, literary myth studies…have argued for the importance of mythopoesis: the mythopoeic imagination as the source of the power of both myth and the best literature. This is close to Frank Kermode’s well-known idea that myth “short-circuits the intellect and liberates the imagination,” or Northrop Frye’s view of literature as displaced mythology, or John Vickery’s argument that The Golden Bough has propelled the modern imagination along an important mythopoeic course”(Gould 4).

Clear Boundaries

I assume Gould means by “literary studies” literature, the study of “‘letters’ or books; polite or humane learning; literary culture”(Metzger, Coogan and Oxford University Press.). If this is the case, his assertions about mythopoesis as source of both myth and literature must also apply to children’s books and songs, the legal genre of founding documents and legislation, genealogies and ideologies, corporate bulletins of vision and purpose, and the products of the media and the internet, as well as the theorizing about and producing of known and emerging texts and mythologies. Clinging mightily to these boundaries, this work will eschew making any suggestions about cultures which refrain from humane learning and creating materials on which may be read implications of psyche, intellect, and imagination.

This work will also refrain from establishing the co-arising of consciousness, community, and communication in human history, rather it will assume their relatedness based on the poiesis that is our legacy on cave walls, centuries of transmitted stories/literature and images, and the urge to think, make, and link "media". Making similar assumptions, William Doty transforms "Martin Heidegger's marvelous 'poetically, man dwells on the earth,'…to 'mythically and ritually, humans live...'" to suggest that "mythopoesis ultimately constitutes the matrixing mode and activity for any and all our endeavors"[Mythography, xvii]. He lays creativity itself in the lap of the mythic where consciousness of fictions overlap and weave "matrixes" readable as ideologies, memory, histories, wonder at mystery, and thinking itself.

Origins in unconsciousness

In the basement floor of this consciousness of psychological fictions there is an implied trapdoor[1]. Beneath awareness of this opportunity to drop there is a midnight blue (Hillman B.F. 154-56) realm of images that rise into dreams and uncomfortable discoveries. It is to posit not only this midnight realm but also its autonomous logic that psychology arose. Thus the "unconscious" was born, began to be learned between "therapist" and "patient", and this one-on-one, individualistic psychology made the contemporary spectrum of process arts, which I will define shortly, possible. Scientistic psychology made the Process Arts concrete. From re-visionings of depth psychology, mythological (archetypally dialogical) psychology makes the Process Arts authentic, by which I mean true to its core myth (psychology) beneath “care of the soul” (Moore), and more mature as a system, conscious of metaphor, subtle of thought or flexible, and sustainable as a discipline - one of the Humanities.

Definition

By Process Arts I mean auto-critical disciplines which are psychological and mythographic and connect operative ideas in a given culture and narrative system of thinking by way of difference and resonance; track the way idea-complexes are connected and interpreted into products; operate fluidly in both sympathy and conflict; value eccentricity and develop distinctions; lead to participation in the creation of said cultures; and effect deepening understanding of being human at both the individual and collective level. “Process Arts” is a function derived and dependent term I coined to posit a spectrum of co-creative potential on which conscious attempts to establish relatedness may be compared using both qualitative and quantitative criteria.

Place

Here are a few overlapping areas wherein may be found potential Process Arts, depending on the way in which they are practiced, divided into casual categories for brevity rather than accuracy. The three general processes portrayed are inextricably simultaneous and interrelated (in any one will be the interaction of the other two) but can be helpful as a narrative frame (myth) for a given interactive context.

Coming into concert

Community Building, administration, public service, governance, civil planning, co-housing, ritual and performance (theater and other ensembles), corporate management, consulting, intentional residential and satellite/urban communities, Organizational Development, the Internet, etc.

Coming into conflict

Martial Art, law, activism, mediation, peaceful intervention, war, sport, self-defense, etc.

Coming to consciousness

mysticism and philosophy, religion/spirituality, humanities education and the liberal arts (including theology and mythology), psychology, etc.

Psychology's derivatives, including psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, gestalt, archetypal psychology, Processwork, Neuro-linguistic Programming, Non-Violent Communication, Hakomi, self-help, coaching, group therapies, etc.

Exclusion

What is not a process art? Practice with insufficient attention devoted to How the process is happening. From the definition above to this point an ethics-neutral fantasy has been maintained to give a sense of the width of disciplines that can be considered Process Arts. Awareness of systemic dynamics, however, gives a certain amount of control over culture-systems. Process artists, professional mass-sales purveyors for example, create systems which dominate choice making beneath the level of conscious awareness. Food resources or persons desiring public office, for example, may be framed such that entire populations are not only excluded from relevant decision making processes but become habituated to the choosing of a more and more tightly controlled and fabricated group of products which are in essence poisonous in the sense of being non-functional our counter-productive for the majority of their existence or even replacements for nourishing food or public service.

The given value of "insufficient" attention to process in the paragraph above, therefore, is hereafter framed in ethical terms as being directly proportional to the degree to which it is possible for any and all participants in a given sphere of influence to choose to be fully involved at the creative, structural, systemic level. I now define Process Arts as disciplines structured to maximize the motivation and capacity for ethical involvement and understanding of any participant in a given system. In that sense process arts are biased toward co-creativity, inclusivity, sympathy, and altruism. This is facilitated, at least at first and in part, by the idea of auto-criticality which suggests systems of thought and practice designed to expose their own flaws authentically and welcome difference and friction. [quote here establishing auto-criticality] This often weary welcome rests in the conviction that there are pauses in different parties wanting different things but never a surcease. Auto-criticality asks how rather than if my understanding is incomplete relative to the needs in this sphere of influence. This undermines the reflex to dominate as compensation for insufficient influence and gives way habitually to more sustainable responses to mortality and finitude than are currently the norm.

Effect

At the quantitative level, it is possible to empirically (based on direct experience) measure in a given system the choice making, kinds of metaphor and language, trends, etc. that make a practice more, rather than less, a process art. At the qualitative level Process Arts result in a felt sense and intuition that can inform analysis but need not become analytical, that leads to a synthetic phenomenology of association and inclusion, and consciousness of a shared narrative environment, or psychological mythology, that supports a peaceful "terrain" in which "conflict done well" and other dynamics which characterize ethical process arts are prevalent. The review of literature that follows develops the idea of the Process Arts by illustrating the growth of a narrative environment that is becoming both more mythological and more psychological and, in the process, more likely to lead to conflict done well and cultures that support ethical consciousness and choice.

To return to my earlier assertions and make the movement of this argument clearer, the idea of the "unconscious" was born [Ellenberger] between "therapist" and "patient", one-on-one, as the only child in the family of an individualistic psychology.

Because of its origins in “medical empiricism”(Hillman H.F. 5), industrial “positivistic psychology and psychopathology”(Hillman Myth of Analysis 155) institutionalized itself somewhere in the vicinity of the sciences and assembled and distributed a wide spectrum of methodologies. From psychoanalysis to self-help, these became the rage, so to speak, and made the contemporary process arts possible. Without the neurotically progressive mechanistic nature of its positivism, corporate, abnormal, psychoanalytic, biological, cognitive, analytic, comparative, developmental, personality, quantitative, social, clinical, political, counseling, educational, forensic, health, human factors, industrial, organizational, school, sensory, and “new-age” psychologies might not have become corporate human resources and management, somatic and expressive therapies, psychological consulting, life-coaching, co-counseling, Alcoholics Anonymous, community building, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, NonViolent Communication, Gestalt, group therapy, and the list goes on, particularly if it includes the various therapies named after founding figures. “The psychotherapy industry…[has provided] a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive.” This sensitivity to the unseen layers of mechanisms beneath human behavior created a social stratum of vocations whose task it is to know how to make that mechanism work. Despite the millions served, “the world is getting worse and worse” (Hillman and Ventura vii).

The dilemma lies in the unseen layers not being a “mechanism”, or perhaps even “layered”, and certainly not subject to colonization or being made to “work”. Those mechanical metaphors don’t work because unconsciousness, rather than The Unconscious, is precisely that. The root assumption in the psychological mythology, its origin story of itself, is not knowing. Thereafter, slights of hand are involved as other systems spin-off their own psychologies, from scientific medicine to corporate ideography. These new psychologies are driven by the imposition of useful (solving dilemmas) rather than disturbing (changed by dilemmas) theoretical raisons d'etre and result in “symptoms…coming back to the consulting room [which are] precisely those its theory engenders: borderline disorders in which the personality does not conform to the limits set by psychology; preoccupation with subjective moods called “addictions” and “recovery”; inability to let the world into one’s perceptual field, called “attention deficit disorders” or “narcissism”; and a vague depressed exhaustion from trying so hard to cope with the enlarged expectations of private self-actualization apart from the actual world”(Hillman in Roszak, Gomes and Kanner xx). The dilemma emerges from imagining and theorizing about unconsciousness as though it were concrete, The Unconscious, and scientistically mechanizing the imagination through which unconsciousness is encountered so it can be made to work when, according to the entire idea of unconsciousness, psyche is autonomous and metaphorical. The imagination of psychology is not true to its own core myth. This does not mean that there has been no care of the soul during the history of psychology, only that it has largely been in spite of the Industry. It also does not mean that the Process Arts are a loss, so quickly after being christened (more on that later). Rather that the processes about which they are artful echo ways of responding to mystery and human need as old as shamanism and tribal leadership, for instance, and are characterized and made more sensitive to the dilemmas arising with an industrial psychology for being spawned by it.

Concrete

Working the intersection of therapy and theology, Thomas Moore connects both Jesus and Hermes to “a change of vision with healing. [He suggests] it is sick to live at the level of perception William Blake referred to as Newton’s sleep. The sickness is not rooted in the depression or the painful marriage; it is the failure to rise above the lowest level of nous, the material perception of facts. In that case you are left, as some therapies are, with the mere engineering of lives. A factual imagination leads to life coaching; metanoia has a far greater impact”(Downing et al. 174). Scientistic psychology made the Process Arts concrete for better, for being useful and easier to distribute, and worse due to shallowness of understanding, building in to most practices “the material perception of facts”, or literalism. This leads to “force reduction”, arbitrarily removing fellow bodies, while not in the military and on behalf of “corporation” that is legally (literarily) but not literally a body, or “coaching” someone not involved in a sport on how to “manage” their life which is not a business. Seeing firing through military eyes is not in itself a problem but it does lead to casualties instead of co-workers. Handling a client like a linebacker can add wonderful energy to a coaching relationship but can lead to career ending injuries when a marriage, for instance, is evaluated by keeping score. When metaphoricality is mostly unconscious in the mind of the facilitator supposed to be tracking a process the stories get tangled unhelpfully and thinking departs abruptly from relationship with and responsibility to its core myth. Perceiving is the issue and returning to what is sensible is a way to return to what can be meaningful.

Focus on Sense, as in archetypal psychology’s Re-visioning

Why does re-visioning, as such, apply?

See it through, see through it, and been seen through results in some transparency

At least two ways:

Sensing differently. A revision is an attempt at paring away what is unnecessary, polishing, literary improvement

Sensing again. A revision is a later version

In the second place of sensing differently, by way of difference, I use mythological and archetypal almost as synonyms. This is not because they are the same but because they move so similarly that, for my purposes, each easily wears the costume of the other while on the stage of culture. With that said let me make clear how they are different, so that the similarities may roll more smoothly in our thinking together, wisely choosing to a halt before colliding with the curbs of dilemma without bumping over disparities left willy-nilly in the road.

So, mythological psychology and psychological mythology.

Mythological implies psychological

Key concepts:

1. Both are about image-thoughts.

1. What is it? Myth connects waking consciousness to what cannot be grasped. An image in myth is any character, figure, presence, or constellation of characters that is evocative. That could range from a well-described fireplace or a visitation by divinity. Could be independently existing with its own reality or it could be a cultural image. Aspects that are important about the image include its being and what it is doing. It is a multisensory but intangible metaphor that has its own reality and its own connections with other entities (Hillman).
2. Why is it important? Images are important in mythological thinking because they serve as connective bridges of building blocks. From words to complex concepts (e.g., fireplace, dog), spoken images have a discrete impact and hold on listeners that allow movement past boundaries into new terrains that is invoked through the use of image. Images contribute to the creation of a helpful story. Speakers rely on images to convey complex meaning, to convey that meaning is complex, and to build a shared experience through which we can come to an understanding. It also is related to meaning making and soul making. Images also tap expressive, multilayered, imaginal aspects of being.
3. How is it used? Track the use of image. I’m a naturalist walking in a terrain of familiar and strange things. I name new things using the images I possess as templates. Image is a unit of consciousness. Image can be used for labeling and understanding discrete energies or entities I encounter. Image is the experience of coming to consciousness about something.
4. What are the benefits? Living in a world of images turns a world of utility and industrialization into a world of context and meaning. Rather than individuals and things only being tools, individuals and things also become entities with their own realities, meanings, and souls. Images convert the world into a place of creation and peace in addition to being a place of consumption.

2. Transformation and healing.

1. Describe it. Where you start is what you know, where you are, who you are. Where you end is going into something strange. Heroes journey. Coming to consciousness about anything. Healing is not the goal unless it is becoming something new.
2. Why is it important? If change is guaranteed and growth is optional…from mythological perspective, it’s not important. There’s no fantasy of improvement. They get sick and well and die and don’t die. How does the story move. Why is it important? It’s not about becoming perfect. What are we doing? How are we getting there? Holding it in one multilayered story framework. Coming to understanding, not perfection.
3. What does it do? How does it move? It moves according to its genre. If you’re wandering from thing to thing. If it’s heroic. Plunging into the fray. It moves in a way appropriate to the world. Transformation changes the human experience. It becomes scope. It’s not always clear.
4. What are the benefits and results? That the difference has been tracked rather than simply falling victim to the change. There is a chance to participate in the change. How conscious were you about things and how unconscious were you about things. This is part of growing up, becoming less literal, becoming more comfortable with metaphor. It stretches your consciousness.

3. Accessing information below the surface.

1. What is it? Rather than providing only straightforward responses to existential dilemmas, myth creates a web of narrative associations within which meaning can be held. King David is both a heroic savior of his people and a debaucher of other men's wives, in addition to all the other dynamics implied in his character. Underneath the surface of the myths we live (the Long War, No Child Left Behind) are included all the ideas involved from doctrines (isms) of terror to the real need to live free of political violence to the sorrow of loss and the joys of triumph over a real and present danger.
2. Why is it important? Because sophistication at this level is synonymous with maturity. The more I am capable of acknowledging what is underneath and behind my and others' behaviors the more I am capable of being both just and compassionate and living in community with other creatures. Then it is possible to intervene in or respond authentically to conflict that may result in inappropriate or needless suffering and find some balance between being self-serving and altruistic. Then is it possible to build character (in the sense James Hillman suggests) and model adequate relationship skills.
3. How is it used? What does it do? How does it move? Descriptive metaphors like "depth" and "blue" and "cycle" and "black" often get applied to below the surface learning. Places beyond clear human control are images which evoke this kind of terrain and way of moving - into the blue of the sea or sky and the black depth of the psyche, underworld, or outer space (the final frontier?). Going deeper or beneath may be accompanied by a sinking feeling, depression, diving or falling in, etc.
4. What happens? Complications and different, perhaps wider understanding. Depth work twists things up and unexpectedly releases as well, and can give more understanding of difficulty, perversity, agony, all the things usually avoided in terms of understanding and accepting. The challenge is to die well (metaphorically in preparation for literally) rather than to die poorly to old ideas and patterns which were already putrifying. Death and putrifaction are natural but a rotting albatross is not something to haul around all the time, if you have the choice.

4. Entertaining ideas and images as partners or guides.

1. Describe: I changed the first word of this question from "use" to "entertainment" because the industrial mind has driven humanity to extinction in an ecocidal utilitarian fantasy. But we do use each other. Creatures consume to survive. That is a natural dilemma to come to terms with. the difficulty arises in the total overconsumption of everything as though all things were made for nothing more than to be consumed by Me rather than gently used when needed by whomever is in need and encouraged to remain whole as well. Entertainment is the word for this question because the post-utilitarian mind hungers for the opportunity to bring new ideas/stories/fantasies/ways of seeing into the parlor for dialogue and consideration entireyl separate from the need for agreement or opposition. Mythological images have their own autonymous reality. Arjuna cares nothing for how the reader wants the Battle of Kurukshetra to end. It ends the way it ends and the Mahābhārata is obviously its own imaginally real world.
2. Why is it important? Imaginal autonomy is important because it leads to epistemological humility. You wouldn't interrupt a master storyteller but new ideas are interrupted and weighed for their effectiveness as weapons before they are even out of the mouth that speaks them. Or they are never felt for their weight much less their texture and smell and guesses into history or origin and potential consequences of use. If the Idea or Image is a partner or guide it must be taken seriously in a different way. It can attack or change directions or reveal something sublime or bore until self-discovery is possible lacking other distractions.
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? The entertainer of ideas is a naturalist of the psyche in the imaginal terrain of what is otherwise hidden, or Under(world), learning names and places and textures. In a dream it is often best that the visitor/guest/dreamer follow, watch, run away, receive without judgment or to much attachment, ask respectful questions when the invitation is given, etc. When an idea comes knocking at the door it may be prudent to peek through the spy-hole to see the expression on its face and what is waiting in the shadows behind it before inviting it in. Then it is the guest and is treated with respect but not allowed to trash the furniture or run off with the innocent child into the night. In either case it is possible to make long term friends and also to be pursued inexorably by enemies until either changes.
4. What happens? When idea/images are treated as autonymous a different dynamic is being practiced from being "just a fantasy" in which the stories and presuppositions which structure literal life are taken seriously and dealt with carefully. The hope is that the fantasies which build nations and shrines and families and war may then be less unconscious and protect the right to legitimate suffering while refraining from inflicting that which needless and brutal.

5. Creative use of story.

1. Describe: It is fundamentally different to respond to a question (e.g., Daddy, who is God?) with simplistic recitals (He is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of everything) rather than with narrative (well, when I asked my father that same question he told me a story that went something like this...). Monosyllables are helpful on the battlefield but give the impression that questions themselves are somehow inappropriate. The process of being drawn into a narrative environment habituates the questioner in a search for context that will continue to bear the fruit of meaning. Formulaic responses instead habituate a snatching at the fruit from the tree of what is either True or False.
2. Why is it important? This matters because both modes (at very least) are required: being able to judge and choose and also to linger patiently through ambiguities. The former belongs to emergencies and clear and present needs and the latter to sitting with other people around the fire of culture-making in other times. It is the shuttling between the two which makes the adult. This is true no matter ones ideological positions and allows space to simply Be human in the company of others, regardless of whether anyone may be of use.
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? Story moves in stages, thus giving the impression of there being time to be authentic to those who consciously participate. Within literary structure there are genres that give the impression of there being many different ways to be, none of which are the only Right option, except as narrative causality dictates. Metafictive devices, for instance, imply that there are stories within stories within stories, matching and validating that way of experiencing daily life. One of the only almost universal agreements among human beings is that we are tellers of stories. Participating in that process opens awareness to the fact that humans are also cocreating each other and culture by the stories that are crafted and told.
4. What happens? Mythography can lead to psychologicality. Everyone truly listening to a story knows when a character does something that doesn't fit or is an easy but unsatisfying way to tie up loose ends. Think of the tidy plot closure in any of the major motion pictures released recently. How many end on a strangely tidy note after a virtual symphony of dischord? What can happen to persons participating in myth-making is an investment in authentic complexity and an acknowledgment of the more ambiguous realities of life.

6. Truth and paradox: The creative tension of opposites

1. Describe: Conflict drives plot. Friction can describe any rubbing of non-identical ideas/desires and is a more neutral word than discomfort adverse consumer culture allows. Literature, myth, and story all depend on creating and holding tension between what is desired and what is So. It is in this juxtaposition that understanding emerges as flexibility and familiarity with complexity.
2. Why is it important? Because the flexible tree bends with the winds of adversity which unavoidably blow through every life. The simplistic personality fractures and remains stuck where it was hurt rather than healing cleanly and becoming more supple. The practice of myth suggests this flexibility and reframes tension so that it need not become epidemic-level hyper-tension but may be received as a guide and normal companion to legitimate suffering as well as discovery.
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? Sympathetically. The reader or listener wants the characters in the story to experience even the most sublime and horrific. That is one of the main reasons fairy tales can be so Grimm. It is a preparation for the truth in paradox that goes along with the holding in the same frame of reference the joys of living with the fear of dying. The sympathetic listener is not identical with the compassionate listener. The relationship is one in which some affinity leads to correspondence of affect, moving alongside, parallel pathos, which means feeling but also suggest suffering.
4. What happens? Incarnate and imaginal characters move along together and learn from suffering, initiating, celebrating, etc. in community.

7. Summary

The moral of this story is not Myth and Psychology = good. Nor do I mean to imply that mythology and psychology are amoral or beyond ethical considerations - far from it. It is essential to be able to hear a story full of tragedy and accept that that is simply what happened and what happens. It is also essential to avoid being a psychotherapist, citizen, and neighbor who hears stories of suffering and has no emotional response beyond "I hear the story of suffering you are telling". When mythology looks through the lens of psychology it sees itself and in itself the potential for therepeia, the choice to contribute to healing, and a language that connects the story process to an era officially unfriendly to fiction and fantasy and yet perpetuating profoundly harmful fantasies and fictions on an alienated and suffering planet.

Archetypal implies mythological

Key concepts:

1. Use of images in mythological psychology.

1. What is it? By “Image” I mean what I understand about Archetypal Psychology’s (Hillman, et al) core idea developed from Analytical Psychology (C.G. Jung, et al). This includes not only visual and other sensory processes in the path from experience to memory and back out to volition but also every autonomous idea that associates for the creation of useful abstractions like “consciousness”, “unconsciousness”, and realms in between like “reality” and “dream”. Images and imagining are presented as the core function of the psyche and as such move in a way that deepen the process of thinking, feeling, and coming to accrete meaning, cultivate understanding, and possibly lead to wisdom from the experience of life.
2. Why is mythological psychology important? Looking through the lens of mythology, depth psychologies frame images in terms of having their own reality and impact so that the core dilemma of being human accretes responses which make meaning. I see the dilemma as something like "what to do with all this experience, much of which I have no control over, so that the places I may create are more beautiful and expressive and less dominated by suppressed feelings, decisions, and habits of thought?" Psychology without mythologicality responds "Become a stronger individual, more heroic, and return to the world acting in a more socially adapted way." This is fine but only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. What is below the water line must, again, deal with not only being heroic or civil but also with eccentricity, specificity of style and difference, and must honor what emerges in fairytales and dreams and conflicts with a life and power of its own.
3. How is mythological psychology used? Images arise and are noticed and are treated with respect. The key is to take the image seriously as an entity in its own right. Then there may be following, tracking, avoiding, befriending, all the possible responses one might bring to an interaction with any respected Other, occasionally bridging that otherness to familiarity and mutual learning.
4. What are the benefits of mythological psychology? The benefits include, most centrally, practices similar to that Buber advocated moving between Ich-Es and Ich-Du relationships and can result in greater flexibility when facing adversity. Staying with the process may also include any of the outcomes associated with suffering, therapy, healing, and creating relationship as an art form. Psychology approaches this through mythopoesis, or myth-making - speech and silence and sharing in the life of the Images, big ideas, or “gods” that “cross our willful path.”(Jung)

2. Transformation and healing associated with a mythological psychology.

1. Describe: the aforementioned flexibility is ideological in nature. I have ideas about how the world works by which I create the cultures in which I participate. What changes in therapy, in mythologizing, in seeing my place in the stories around and within me is flexibility - an ability to bend with less damage, bring agonies into an imaginable context that can contain and makes understanding and thereby change or at least tomorrow possible.
2. Why is it important? Because building strength and capacity is only one part of being human. Without other depth essential ideas like “a good death”, becoming an elder, and initiation are lost.
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? Like effective Aikido the movement in this process is sympathetic and responsive from a deep grounding rather than resistive and reactive from barely buried surface roots.
4. What happens, costs, benefits, results? A certain amount of simplicity is lost when psychology becomes mythological. There are certainly times for ego triage and that is not necessarily the time for evoking as many layers of understanding as possible. But when persons or groups live the myths in their sphere of influence as though they were psychological, archetypal, and peopled by autonymous roles and images, even emergencies take on a different character and are part of the story rather than being resisted and thereby exacerbated.

3. How mythological psychology reaches dynamics below the surface.

1. Describe: By way of mythologizing, psychology surfaces a bit of, or at least takes seriously the impact of what is unseen, underneath, and powerful for being both operative and invisible. Where mythology repeats this movement in the development of story and context, psychology develops the storying and context making as soul-work f potentially leading to understanding and greater depth of experience. In this sense psychology does purposefully what myth does automatically and contemporary mythological studies notice psychologically.
2. Why is it important? Because a non-mythological psychology (way of caring for the soul), like the aforementioned non-psychological mythology, is the foundation of inflexible ideology and utilitarian depersonalization. If I don’t, or my therapist doesn’t, see “my” ideas (psychology) as an undercurrent of mythic material, then the collective impact is missed and changes in behavior and understanding remain at the level of ego and facade.
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? 70 w
4. What happens, costs, benefits, results? 70 w

4. Use of partners or guides.

1. Describe: There is a fantasy in medicalized psychotherapy that the correct therapeutic relationship is equivalent to the formal consulting room process with which most are familiar. A mythological psychology brings the proceedings immediately into relationship with others – cultural, historical, imaginal, archetypal figures which may be struggled with fruitfully and which may become partners and guides.
2. Why is it important? What is missing without and gained with it? With a psychology that is mythic relationship in community is the immediate context. If for no other reason, this is desirable as a partial antidote to the alienation and lack of initiation into contemporary realities.
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? Like a naturalist in the terrain of experience, noticing what is present and sensing how it fits into the story in progress before naming, interpreting, claiming, or anything else personal.
4. What happens, costs, benefits, results? Without conscious mythicity psychology risks continued solipsism and irrelevance beyond the world of the ego.

5. Creative use of story.

1. Describe: I’ll oversimplify and casually apply caricatures for a moment to make a point. The Freudian caricature suggest a silent and nigh invisible therapist perched behind a couch in a dark office listening (or nodding off) as the patient talks on and on. The Jungian caricature involves boxes of sand and dolls for active imagination experiments and New Age fascinations with obscure occultisms. The Archetypal caricature might be a bi-polar, by-turns grim and puerile philosopher, making things worse so that they might get better someday. Any well-practiced psychology is mythological and softens the doctrinal edges of any approach, including its own, with the move into “this is another story about how we do what we do”. The questions becomes one of genre – how does this kind of approach move and where is it getting us. The process itself becomes the art form.
2. Why is it important? What is missing without and gained with it? As a reform this is important in response to the “hundred years of psychotherapy” after which the world is getting worse.(Hillman and Ventura)
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? The issue is not one of using story but working by way of imagining everything in terms of myth.
4. What can happen that is desirable and undesirable? Doing so constantly draws attention to the roles everyone plays, the history, the present situation, hopes for the future, and creates a cocreative narrative context rather than simply reinforcing the way things have always been.

6. Truth and paradox: The creative tension of opposites

1. Describe: Jung, following traditions as old as philosophy, practiced a move beyond simplistic thinking by establishing value for purposefully holding the tension of opposites and adding a third perspective to any two part pairing. A mythological psychology gets at truth in the same way story does, by appearing to put it aside in order to participate in a narrative. (“Daddy. Who is God?” - “Well, sweetie, Once Upon a Time…”) This allows creative imaginal space, bounded by oppositions, into which a variety of paradoxical worldviews will emerge and interact.
2. Why is it important? Valuable tension and the geometry of inclusion of multiple voices (from triangulation to a number of participants equal to an entire sphere of influence) creates more dynamic and imaginative responses to dilemmas.
3. How? What does it do? How does it move? This assumes that there will always be multiple influences and the choice of which to include and ignore fundamentally effects the degree to which understanding and comprehensive decision making is possible.
4. What happens, costs, benefits, results? Ignore a voice and find it coming back later in disguise. Enantiodromia (Jung and Beebe). Pre-socratic Greek philosophy (Heraclitus and Haxton) (below). Dialectical monism.

"By cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine. All things change. Fire penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining bodies die and rise again in smoke called incense." (fragment 36)

"Men do not know how that which is drawn in different directions harmonizes with itself. The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension like that of the bow and the lyre."

“One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict.” -- Cited by Origen, Contra Celsum VI.28 (Diels-Kranz fragment 80)

“The way up and down are the same.” -- Cited by Hippolytus, Refutatio IX.10.4 (Diels-Kranz fragment 60)

“It is wise, not listening to me but to the report (λόγος), to agree that all things are one.” -- Cited by Hippolytus, Refutatio IX.9.1 (Diels-Kranz fragment 50)

Mythological psychology wherein no single existential summary can be more than an additional flag raised on the field where ideas gather.

7. Summary 70 pp

The reason contemporary psychology looks (or ought to look) through the lens of mythology (especially in therapy) is to shift from neurotic individualism and the cult of the personal toward a deeper view of both roots and branches of culture - renewing relationship with archetypal, process-level, collective unconsciousness. Through the filter of mythology it sees itself, its origins in the exchange of words to get at what is meant in being human, and hears the sounds of its own milk tongue.

Archetypal Psychology, the making of a more mythological psychology through more psychological approaches to mythology, is polyvalent and polysemic, leading to a multi-disciplinary approach. Even, and often especially, those who do not consider themselves therapists or even psychologist bring to their work an aesthetic sense of the hidden, a psychology that is simultaneously archetypal and mythological. The writers that follow identify with Jung or with archetypal psychological to different degrees but all suggest thinking that moves in parallel toward Process Arts.

• Theoretical and Practical Foundations (Jung’s Analytical Psychology) [shift to description] 1.5 p
• Freud’s influence 20% 75 w – psychoanalysis relied heavily on myths – both reference to known narrative and creation of new case “histories” (Healing Friction) as well as Freud’s conscious mythography.
• Jung’s influence 30% 110 w – Jung mythologized - moved Psychoanalysis’ reification of fantasy (through interpretation) further toward advocating the autonomy of the “objective psyche” and “collective unconscious”
• Innovations of Archetypalists (e.g., Hillman, Berry, Moore, etc.) 50% 190 w – Archetypal (mythological) psychology moves the autonomousness of unconsciousness into the world as well by re-valuing the Imaginal (Corbin and Avicenna) and insisting upon an ensouled cosmos that is not defined by its usefulness to or circumscription by the human mind.
• How it moves: Archetypal Psychology makes room for the Process Arts by making psychological roots auto-critical via neglected image and its twin reflection, by mythically complicating progressive interpretations of psychology, by shuttling beneath ego psychology both back to depth psychology and forth to Image. Further complications by way of Giegerich and others then make a fully mythological psychology possible. I suggest what that re-visioning process might see and this sense of mythicity might feel 1.5 p
• Association (Simile) 95 w What is implied, and already in progress in the world, is the co-creation of a process-level “alchemical” art form. The form is artful in that it initiates an anamnestic creative cycle of descent and return - an orphic process balancing and synthesizing different and related ideas while they are in the motions of association. This requires mapping and descending, shuttling between oppositional ideas in creative tension, and triangulating ideas in relationship just beyond circumscription by duality.
• Contextualization 95 w - Ed Casey talks about Place and Edge in a way that makes this clearer. There is an essential function of Place, or context that allows for the consideration of genre. “Where” leads to a discussion of “how” without being stopped by the anxiety around “what”. Without some initiation into a context that is both shared and interpreted in a way that supports understanding, living itself is not supported. Freud – Eros~Thantos.
• Archetypal phenomenology and description 95 w follows image (like Montessori does the child) and is interested in what can be described before analysis utility become ascendant.
• Thinking, abstraction, and appropriate distance 95 w
• What are the impacts of archetypal psychology? 1.5 p Without it contemporary psychology lacks a critique that is both fundamental and extensive, applying both to the roots of psychological ideas and beyond the cloistered therapeutic hour to far reaching cultural consequences.
• Dallas Institute and focus on the City and educating educators
• Care of the Soul phenomenon
• Pacifica Graduate Institute
• How do I apply it? 1.5 p Contemporary middle class persons worldwide are accustomed to working with basic psychological ideas and terms, the basic interventions of archetypal psychology are most visible in application and lay the foundations for core Process Arts structures:
• Autocriticality, or “Re-visioning” similar but not identical to deconstructionism
• Summary 1 p

• Development of the Concept (path and evolution from the foundations to present to future) 2 p
• Hillman
• moves directly into conflict with Jungian doctrinalism through reference to Jung and reestablishes darkness, what is rejected, and division rather than wholeness as the depth psychological bellwether. “Differentiation”, [Jung] declares, “means the development of differences, the separation of parts from the whole.” (CW 6:705) Not wholeness defines individuation, but separation of parts: complexes and functions one from the other, projections from actualities, individual from collective, God-images from gods, and the metaphorical from the metaphysical. (CW 11:835-36, CW 13:73-75). ("Jung's Daimonic Inheritance" 12)
• Berry 55 w
• identifies the entire narrative process with heroism and psychology’s idea of ego, so an inquiry into heroic myths psychologically problematizes any process of reduction for the purpose of victory, healing, control, etc.
• Moore
• practices a mythological psychology that leads to his proposition of a "new monasticism" recovering “the attentiveness we Westerners lost as we went about the business of “modernizing” the planet through science, technology, commerce, and colonialism (with not a little help from Christianity)” (20).
• He begins the prologue to his collection of Hillman’s work drawing a distinction very similar to the one I use to clarify the need for the Process Arts. By saying that “James Hillman is an artist of psychology,” Moore implies that there is a deeper level of practice psychology requires, and which Hillman demonstrates, that has to do with being “challenged all along the way to rethink, to re-vision, and to reimagine…nothing short of a new way of thinking.”
• If Hillman is therapy's therapist, Moore is culture's priest. Without sacrificing specificity, Moore's cultural criticism feels more like the careful touch of pastoral counseling than the scalpel of psychoanalysis. There is a residual monastic humility in his insistence on rituals of the imagination being the way we understand ourselves and our dilemmas. By taking this approach, he models a mode of working with mythological psychology that is true to the way Hillman advocates working with image as though it were autonomous and strange and deserving of respect. Rather than a style of criticism that seizes the opposition and makes it see its flaw, Moore invites us to both meditation and caritas.
• Why is this important to know? 60 w One of the shadows of psychoanalysis is its scientific-analytic penchant for encouraging narratives of heroic agony. Moore's mythography actually has a bedside manner that parallels the resonance or sympathy required to entertain ideas rather than believing or attacking.
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? An introverted way of critique that approaches the education of the heart through the darker sides of Eros and the reenchantment of everyday life through a dark and blue night of mysterious understanding that balances rather than replaces the midday certainties of technological scientism.
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Moore calls for each and every step of the innovations recommended in this paper. In reminiscing about the Dallas Institute, he calls for "creative people sticking their heads outside the sphere of conventional thought... looking through the chinks in the cosmic egg of our agreed-upon worldview [and the] influence of the arts, spirituality, or academia on the severe problems of our world at home and abroad... on a larger scale... all depend[ing] on the depth and relevance of our work and imagination... and poetical approach" [RotI, ix].
• Paris
• A powerfully and direct invitation to consider a polycentric, “pagan,” archetypally feminine “régime nocturne”(Durand) which both Hillman and Moore recapitulate.

• Romanyshyn
• maps psychological descending thorough “gaps in our meanings even as there are meanings in these gaps,” and “respect[ing] … differences while witnessing … affinity[ies]”(58-59).
• His phenomenological approach to Research with Soul in Mind outlines an heuristic alchemy that “tak[es] on a topic by which one is addressed (vocation), [such that] the researcher enters a ritual space (mundus imaginalis) in which—by the fires of love, and in the presence of a guide—he or she is both deepened by the work (transference levels), and worked over and transformed by the work, even becoming the work and living it in an embodied way (gnosis)”(end).
• He states explicitly what many imply, a next step into “the work” into intertextuality, making community that works for all by way of a mythologizing inquiry that is psychological.

• The synthesis of the Process Arts from a mythographic psychology of culture is polydisciplinary, accessing philosophy, cultural study/criticism, education, psychology, therapy, mythology, religion, theology, religious studies, literature, poetics, cognitive linguistics, economics, organizational development, anthropology, archaeology, ecopsychology, processwork, activism, change management, more…
• Why? Each author contributes to re-visioning culture, already self-replicating and speaking the language of psychology, into a field that naturally encourages psychopoiesis (soul-making) that is mythological. This shift is associative, focused on associating differences and deepening relatedness for understanding, complicating thinking at crossroads between cultures and fields rather than reinforcing utilitarian monocultures (monotheisms) and individualisms. Each opens space for the development of Process Arts by engaging in culture-making by moving directly and indirectly into careful conflict.
• By author:
• Miller 55 w – really belongs neither with the psychologists nor with his original tribe, the philosopher-theologians, because he is more truly both than either. He illuminates the Hillman-Giegerich conversation and offers an “analogical method for teaching the relevance of myth” (Hillman "Image-Sense") that is a clear methodological precursor of the synthetic associative inquiries practiced here. He moves to polyvocality (New Polytheism), multiple images of divinity (Christs) and (Three Faces) and brings to more variegated light the foundations in antiquity of the contemporary psyche. His early work with the figure of the clown in history and post-modernity (Gods and Games), figures prominently in breaking open responses to fundamental(ist) cultural dilemmas through ironic f(r)iction. He hints broadly (Hells) about the kinds of derangement necessary to work toward ideological autodeconstruction through epistemological humility.
• Giegerich 55 w - (Soul's Logical Life), asks that archetypal ideas receive a kind of thinking beyond being framed as images per se. His helpful mercilessness shifts the post-modern and even archetypal psychological attention toward the kind of disciplined abstraction ("End of Meaning") necessary for addressing the complexity of the contemporary cultural context. His way of moving beyond
• Mogenson 55 w - suggests that “disturbed metaphor…moves in the psyche among other metaphors … [denying] its relativity as a metaphor.” The “One who must always be first, the One who commands us to know Him as the one true God” (47) has large, rather sharp elbows and demands the edging out of other ways of metaphorical knowing. Over two thousand years of this can become habit forming and Prometheus and his ilk become uncomplicated bronzes, corporate logos, and catch phrases. This process, as a basis of culture-making, will be a major theme, and something to learn from in order to shrink the influence of auto-centralizing, by which I mean dominance by operatively solipsistic, ideas.
• Shenk 55 w – is a Jungian therapist and also a crossover artist in the vein of David Miller, weaving post-modern movement and deconstructionism with tragic foolishness and the phenomenological ground (Schenk) from which an archetypal and mythological psychology spring.
• Kugler 55 w – works primarily through language (Alchemy of Discourse) into contextualizing psychological etiology (Raids) and supports the centrality of conflict both in Freud and Jung, the definition of soul work in terms of difference rather than correspondence, outlines the influence of post-modernism on psychological thinking and, I will argue, in so doing offers a wealth of examples of contemporary psychology becoming more overtly mythological.
• Campbell
• What are they thinking? 60 w Campbell not only thinks mythically but also publicly, given his unexpected fame and influence on widely distributed public media (Star Wars). By beginning with the proposal of his heroic monomyth he offered not the truth, though he was convinced in large part of its universal applicability, but initiation into a process of struggling with a strongly propounded ideology at least in part built unconsciously with the tools of which the ideology is most critical. The Dead Gods of Myth, the demise of which Campbell uses to close Hero, obscure the ongoing myth of "shattering" "the dream-web of myth" "with sure and mighty strokes". Campbell thinks by way of the same "strokes" that he decries, providing a material example of the inescapability of myth despite the feeling that there is "no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope"[insert p387].
• Why is this important to know? 60 w Because it creates a mythic world, like but consequent to the one being mourned as no longer possible, by framing everything in terms of a (mono-) myth about myths. This plunges anyone aware at the process-level and not in total agreement with the monocular ideology into an autocritical process that requires awareness of mythicity and culturopoieses. Campbell "speaks of the power of myth powerfully...so that he can speak of its powerlessness"[Paths to the Power of Myth - Miller p108] so that the power of this myth - the powerlessness of myth - may contribute to remythologizing the world through the revaluing of systemic mythography that is immensely powerful the moment it has been resurrected from the "murder" of "turning it into belief and meaning"[Paths to the Power of Myth - Miller p110].
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 w Beyond the monomyth, Campbell's scholarship balances utilitarian psychologizing about myth much the same way archetypal psychology does - working with "polysynthetic and polysemantic" images [Gander, 128] which theoretically found "a system of mythological symbols... alive and fully operative... uniting in a single cohesive order, all phenomena both of the corporeal--'directly obvious' (prayatska)--sphere of waking consciousness, and of the spiritual--metaphysical, occult, purely intelligible (paroska)--sphere of dream" [Gander, 129].
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Working with mythological cosmologies at the systems level, Campbell makes mythography essential as a cultural practice, an individual practice, and as an element of education. This anchors mythography in the history of scholarship as a Process Art. Campbell marks a transition in consciousness between two ways of mythogrpahy by shuttling back and forth between the two. He proposes both old and dead mythologies in their obective sense and new mythologies "of infinite space and its light...without as well as within" [Myths to Live By, 266]. His thinking moves back and forth between using/colonizing other people's myths and living in the search for understanding of mythicity itself, thereby "anticipating the religons of the next century"[Paths to the Power of Myth-Doty p11].
• Noel
• What are they thinking? 60 w Noel is thinking in terms of community. From his first published offering, Echoes of the Wordless Word, he brings together and works co-creatively with other people as editor using "telling tales and terrestrial reconnections" to make "a place for myth" [Paths to the Power of Myth - Noel p132] When he writes alone, he dreams onward into a new Soul of Shamanism the myth-work of building community. He values neopaganism in this context, for instance, because it can "work consciously, in impressively communal rituals, from an admitted imaginal base" [Soul of Shamanism, p.215]. By doing so he tills the ground for planting a new myth about myth-making and myth-living, a next-step in relating to Mystery that is more than aware of the power of operative fictions, and is founded therein.
• Why is this important to know? 60 w Since the 1970's, Noel has tracked a "new God image"(Eddinger), an evolving sense of the spiritual that includes psychological attunement to the imaginal, a conscious mythography of sleeping and waking dreams "draw[ing] on the arts more than the sciences...in order to avoid the lure of literalism" [Soul of Shamanism, p.215]. His advocacy is of a mythologizing that is authentically grounded in the "western" spiritual reality and, like Thomas Moore's work, links archetypal psychology with a more overtly religious sensibility that is resistant to dogmatizing because it is not only"of imagination, or...about images,...but "thinks with images as it approaches the self and the world"[SoS p111].
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 Without Noel, an understanding of the mythicity in which the Process Arts arise lacks sufficiently strong bonds between the reinterpretation of the "empirical disguise" of psychology, the "new relationship with the imagination" [SoS p115], and the methods by which to approach a therapy for the acute schizophrenia of the modern condition so well revealed by its projection on shamans by "Western observers"[SoS p114].
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Noel's neoshamanism teaches attunement "to the psychological and aesthetic process of imagining...in contrast to fixating on particular products of the process as objects of belief"[SoS p75]
• Slattery
• What are they thinking? 60 w Champion of "the essential dignity of aesthetic experience" [Merton, "Poetry and Contemplation: a Reappraisal"], Slattery celebrates "the soul's propensity... to remain in motion, to be embodied, to be involved with the stuff of the world, and to find artistic or poetic expressions of itself in making, crafting, telling, talking, in the great web formed by poiesis" [TWB, 39].
• Why is this important to know? 60 w If ever there were doubt that essential (classic?) literature is the mirror of the core of the human experience, Slattery assuages. The idea that culture is made by, is inscribed, is reflective of "myth [which] records our double in the depths of the world" [TWB, 147]. Slattery feels language in the sense that Lacan knows it "is a subtle body... trapped in ...corporeal images" [Ecrits, 87], participating in a "grand mything plaiting of Being" [TWB p41].
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 Slattery's idea of "the artist takes us further under the skin of scars and returns us to the original experience" that is the prima materia worked by the Process Arts. His understanding of the world as textual and mimetic opens a door for understanding and participating in culturopoiesis. His work with wounds supports the idea of Healing Friction and "may separate us out and highlight our individual story [while these] narratives may also initialize us into a larger communal field... part of communitas, retaining our individuated being... while intertwining our lives with others"[TWB 238], leading to the study of our ideas of ourselves through our stories and stories about our stories (mythography) and the community of understanding this process creates.
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Slattery worked with The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture to instruct and inspire public school teachers and principles and evoke the power of mythography in their work. He writes not only scholarly explorations of psychological and literary thresholds but also Op Ed pieces and letters to editors in the essential tradition of the public intellectual. He insists, like all process artists, on the indivisible connection of the how to the what of poiesis, in his published work and classes touching on both literary theory and consequential mythopoesis, the concrete (decline of religious ritual in the face of technologized experience) and metaphorical ("the body's own intelligence, its own imagination, even its own wisdom, has been foreclosed by a management mythos”(91)). He practices one of the essential boundary violations that make the process art of harvesting darkness essential – the recursive journey into the taboo underworld of the creative unconscious -- how things happen -- and back to produce and reproduce the markings on the body politic and body of knowledge which are its manifestations.
• Louise Cowan
• What are they thinking? 60 w Louise Cowan reveals her
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Donald Cowan
• What are they thinking? 60 w Louise Cowan reveals her
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Bachelard
• What are they thinking? 60 w
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Bly
• What are they thinking? 60 w
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Gould
• What are they thinking? 60 w
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Doty
• What are they thinking? 60 w Though Doty comes more to praise Hillman than to discuss him, he does for mythology something of what Hillman does for psychology, that is take it’s roots seriously, that is critically, framing his project in terms of mythography – studies of myth an ritual. He also gives Gould’s idea of mythicity a central place in his work and some richly deserved space to stretch its legs and meet other ideas.
• Why is this important to know? 60 w This is important because an uncritical, i.e. undereducated, public lumps most of anything beginning myth__ as being not only specious but, worse, beneath consideration. This re-submerges a fundamentally operative level of reality creating consciousness and posts signs at all entrances reading “Old, useless stuff – don’t bother.” This translates as “Powerbrokers Only.” Doty works this material from antiquity through The Matrix into post-post wherever we are now.
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 w Relevance and continuity in seriously studying how pervasive are the threads of the logos in what is mythic. He does much of the background work making explicit the psychologizing of mythology and the mythologizing of psychology on which much of my work rests and on which the Process Arts are founded.
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w He moves to end his Mythography in the midst of a demythologized cosmos John Hayward makes synonymous with “converting mythical transcendence models (concrete narratives of gods and men) into abstract transcendence models (general principles underlying systems of thought”(Doty 240). It is this terrain which necessitates mythography at the level of “Gould’s emphasis upon the philosophical functions of the mythic as an element of consciousness, upon mythicity” (Doty 241). Process Arts perform in a social setting the act of mythography (studying daily and systemic abstract models), in an environment of mythicity (abstract transcendence models functioning philosophically – in thinking, behavior, and culture-making). Myths, says Doty in the introduction to his Myth: a Handbook “are seldom fantasy constructions; more frequently they are the backbones of practical ways of living realistically”[p 3]. He ends that book with “contemporary uses of myth”[163] and enumerates the places the word mythos is appropriate, from deep story, plot, and narrative, to sets of attitudes, interrelated beliefs, values, and transformations of mythological materials and motifs into new, mythopoeic creations, including “the enhancement of self-conscious political agency by developing mythological imagery, symbolism, and story”[165]. In short, the making of culture.
• Donniger
• What are they thinking? 60 w
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Eliade
• What are they thinking? 60 w
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Arnold Mindell
• What are they thinking? 60 w Combines traditional Jungian training with an academic background in physics and a martial background in Aikido to create “Processwork”, a systemic, relational field theory that leads to practices ranging from inner work and one-on-one counseling that resembles psychotherapy to “Worldwork” that invites groups of any size into the practice of conscious conflict for the betterment of all.
• Why is this important to know? 60 w “Processworkers” worldwide have had considerable success bringing the practice of compassionate relatedness off the analytic couch and into the world such that a spectrum of new and refined theories and tools are available in developing the Process Arts.
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 w Mindell helps to surface a myth of “process” in the naming of the terrain in which psychology becomes more archetypal (“time-spirit”), mythic, and better able to escape the tyranny of the Myth of Progress. Also, the specifics of each Processworker’s vocation echo Mindell’s general theory and inflect their work in the world such that their individual contributions may be considered Process Arts in their own right. Arnold Mendel works beautifully with coma, dream, cultural re-visioning and organization building, and _____. Amy Mindell articulates a range of “meta-skills” for process-level work. Lane Arye extends the metaphor in the direction of “Unintentional Music”, relaxing the clinical environment to embrace the creation of art beyond fantasies of perfection which bring disempowered voices in need of hearing into the co-creative process.
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w see above.
• Lakoff
• What are they thinking? 60 w
• Why is this important to know? 60 w Lakoff at least triangulates – not just psychology and mythology but linguistics and deeper into a philosophical systems theory. Establishing in the dominant mythology of science the priority of metaphor in cognition makes way for an elder sibling, myth, to be born again as the younger sibling, mythology, thereby making way for Associative Inquiry.
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60
• “the nature of meaning, conceptualization, reasoning, and language are questions requiring empirical study [which] cannot be answered adequately by a mere a priori philosophizing”(Lakoff and Johnson 246). Also Lakoff, and others in cognitive linguistics, map metpahoricality onto the physiological, laying additional groundwork for the move from philosophy to activism.
• Despite an understanding of myth just creeping up the same shores of impoverishment they sketch out to make a case for re-imagining metaphor “the fact that the myths of subjectivism and objectivism have stood for so long in Western culture indicates that each serves some important function. Each myth is motivated by real and reasonable concerns, and each has some grounding in our cultural experience” (226), Lakoff and Johnson provide through the “imaginative rationality”(235) of metaphor several building blocks of what has grown to be mythological systems theory.
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Empirical study and the practice of awareness of the metaphoricality of understanding is a potential Process Art. Metaphor theory models autocriticality by advocating and practicing the critical application of its own system to itself, short of becoming systemically mythological, i.e. moving from .
• Kidner
• What is he thinking? 60 w to critique constructionist industrialism, or “the colonization of the life-world by the exotic ideology of technologism”(Kidner 67), in order to re-symbolize and heal the world of its repressed culture-wounds through a radically inclusive ecopsychology.
• Why is this important to know? 60 w It models a way and sets the bar for the depth to which part of an associative inquiry may go, while indicating the vast field of work still remaining and setting up a web of associations for others to apply.
• What’s missing without this writer? 60 w The extensive vocabulary for criticism from within psychology of the ways it contributes to its own subservience to the Industrial Mind.
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Kidner’s style of critique digs behind categories of thinking with one hand while holding in focus with the other hand the kind of thinking that gave rise to the dilemma being critiqued. This models the kind of auto-criticality practiced in Process Arts.

• Mamet
• What are they thinking? 60 w speaks directly to the actor and, by extension, to the performative artist of process making concrete behavioral choices meant to fit into a narrative terrain. His voice, and that of “the dramatic urge—our impulse to structure cause and effect in order to increase our store of practical knowledge about the universe”(6), is one of critique being essential to art and not split off into the person of The Critic. He aligns the dramatic process with the psychological project and the making of the narrative we realize as culture.
• Why is this important to know? 60 w Supports Healing Fiction and aligns theater-making with culture-making by identifying with humanity as a whole the process of “elaborate[ing] perception into hypotheses and then reduc[ing] those hypotheses to information upon which we can act”(75).
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 Work with “the Hero” as a device. Framing myth, religion, and tragedy as approaching human insecurity in terms of awakening awe and avowing powerlessness in order to “free us of the burden of its repression”(15).
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Mamet gives theater weight in an era when the coffin of dead ritual tends to get carried out on a lite bier. He abhors the dismissal of theater (and consequently other living fictions like the building of community) by consigning it to dwell in liesure time with entertainment media in the cultural imagination. This culture is troubled by a “supposed ability to sidestep, to forgo, ritual” which “comes from a mistaken belief in one’s own powers and a misapprehension of personal grace”(68). The Process Arts work toward a collective epistemological humility which reestablishes the dramatic rituals that build community through conscious, artful fictions.
• Smith
• What are they thinking? 60 w
• Why is this important to know? 60 w
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 w
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w
• Keen
• What are they thinking? 60 w What Kidner does with direct attack on the concrete encasing the industrial mind, and Miller and Giegerich do with careful re-thinking and negation, respectively, Keen does with theopoetics and mythopoiesis. From his earliest Apology For Wonder he has wanted To Love and Be Loved, and builds a case for community on purpose and relationship to the divine trusting not in homo faber, finally, but in “the vigil that love keeps in the perennial darkness of human history [that] does not give us a vision of triumph or a promise of perfection. The great clarity it offers is the certain knowledge that we are sundered, dismembered, alienated from the totality to which we belong…and the hope, which is inseparable from prayer, that what ha been dismembered can be remembered. Our longing to be reunited with our self, our parents, our children, our lovers, our neighbors, our animal familiars, is at once a token of our exile and our citizenship in a commonwealth of Beings. And prayer is nothing more or less than remembering and re-minding ourselves to participate joyously in that community within which we live and move and have our being. To love, to hope, to pray is to wager that communion rather than isolation is the ultimate fact that governs human destiny, and to wait—all through the night”(To Love and Be Loved 243-4).
• Why is this important to know? 60 w Because it brings the Faces of the Enemy into focus as persons with whom to conflict well, rather than through de-humanization of everyone involved, and values the Fire in the Belly that brings authentic identity rather than tired fantasies of half-heroes into the most important human struggles.
• What’s missing without this writer?/Gained by inclusion? 60 w A more careful study of Joseph Campbell and a deeply thoughtful and muscular scholarship that brings myth fully into power as a cultural systems theory that does not require the validation of other systems of thought and nonetheless benefits from crossing boundaries of kinds of understanding.
• What is the contribution to making a place for Process Arts? 60 w Faces builds Healing Friction, Voices and Visions adds profoundly to the terrain within which the Process Arts develop, and Dancing God calls for the Guardians of Peace writ large. Keen calls for “a department of “Wonder, Wisdom, and Serendipitous Knowledge, which would be charged with the prophetic task of discovering the unfashionable questions which are not being asked and the life options which are not being explored within the educational system. In the university such a department would study the university…its rhetoric…ideology…performance…and make students aware of [the] disrespectable, out of fashion, taboo, dangerous, or politically forbidden. It might even be well for the government to set up a new cabinet position devoted to raising embarrassing questions, considering neglected alternatives, and dramatizing different models of the fully human community”(To a Dancing God 42)

Dialogical implies cultural

Hillman on a.p. as dialogical

“writing-as-dialogue, thinking-as-dialogue, does let in, or at least imply? invite? the community…people taking is, at least conceptually, open to the community. Open to interruption”(Hillman and Ventura 186).

Autocriticality

If myth is the focus a facilitator operates by way of dilemmas, or tensions between metaphors. I assert here that the problem with psychology and with most proto-process arts is literalism, or failing to credit with autonomy some side/character of a story currently being lived. The “coach” might not be watchful for the ways dynamics from sport will sneak in and undermine the core task – surrender to the necessity of dilemma. If I am right, and dilemmas are not to be avoided but included in awareness, as much as is possible, then I will fail throughout this work to adequately account for gaps and stoppage while “in process”, exclusivity and oppression “in community”, shallowness of interpretation “in critique”, etc. This is not a reason to pitch these pages in the recycling (reclamation of energy waste). Rather, it is the reader’s part to notice in the conversation about culturopoiesis how to develop sophistication in the ways culture is not made consciously. While developing Associative Inquiry there is a responsible for clearly delineating what will be imagined as unrelated in a given sphere of influence. Healing Friction is, by paradoxical definition, working with the ways in which friction is not healing. Guardians of Peace will certainly struggle with being both excessively aggressive and passive by turns and not very good lovers of the idea of conflict done well. Bluevolution will move on too quickly from grief to relief.

Authenticity

These allow for a kind of imagination from which the Process Arts may become authentic. By authentic I mean a maturity (greater experience and often wisdom) that comes of being true to the core myth—psychologicality—beneath, closer and closer to “care of the soul” (Moore), “unconditional surrender to its underlying pre-conception of the world…relentlessly [bound] to the unknownness of its own root fantasy”(Giegerich "Comment" 172-73).

Systemic maturity

conscious of metaphor

th

subtle and flexible

th

sustainable as a discipline, ie one of the Humanities

th

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[1] See Jung’s dream of the basement trapdoor