|
“The capacity to be at home in ourselves is a vital requirement in the creativity and integrity of the individual personality.”
---John O’Donohue
Below are interviews I conducted with two of the renowned presenters at our upcoming seminar this year, “The Archetype of Home”, which will take place in beautiful, erudite Dublin and County Galway, March 26-April 2, 2009.
What is home? How do we find home? Are we “at home” with ourselves and our relationships? Like the heroes of myths and lore, do we need to leave our “safe nests” and find challenge and adversity before returning home with a new sense of identity? How do we temper the need for home with our wanderlust and need for adventure? For some, the “yearning for home” means visiting the land of our ancestry, while for others, “coming home” is the connection to spirituality.
During the course of this seminar, we will explore these themes and many others as we consider what makes us feel at home in our own psyches, homes, sacred spaces and relationships.
Open to individuals from all fields as well as mental health professionals, this program combines presentations, workshops, dialogue, Irish music and culture with visits to Clonmacnoise, Glenstal Abbey and a cruise along the Lough Corrib.
Interview with Mark Patrick Hederman
by Lauren Yanks
JUNG IN IRELAND
"The Archetype of Home"
Dublin and County Galway, Ireland
March 26 - April 2, 2009
Below is an interview I conducted with Mark Patrick Hederman, the abbot of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, where he has been a monk for the past 40 years. A founding editor of the "Journal of Irish Studies", Hederman spent the first years of the new century wandering in search of the Holy Spirit, letting inspiration guide him. Among his many publications are Walkabout: Life as Holy Spirit; The Haunted Inkwell; and Kissing the Dark.
Hederman will be one of the presenters in the 2009 Jung in Ireland seminar. He will run a workshop entitled "A Tale of Two Towers: Jung and Yeats", and he will also be welcoming participants to Glenstal Abbey and discussing "The Monastery as Domum Dei" (House of God).
I see your doing a workshop entitled "A Tale of Two Towers: Jung and Yeats". What would you say is the relationship between both men's work? And how does that fit in with the theme "The Archetype of Home"?
The archetype of home is ambiguous. Home can be a place of the past, which you yearn for, even if you have never experienced it personally; or it can be a place of the future which you create yourself. Yeats and Jung both created towers for themselves which embodied the discoveries they had made about what it means to be really human: Jung called this ‘individuation’; Yeats called it ‘unity of being’. Bollingen and Thoor Ballylee still stand as monuments or symbols of the achievement of two great persons who have shown us the way towards finding our home in the world. Both engaged in this work between 1922 and 1928 without being aware of each other’s design, but in so doing, they act as synchronistic exemplars of the unconscious which unites and guides us all, if we follow its promptings.
Can you tell us a little bit about what we might experience at Glenstal Abbey, and what made you choose that abbey as your "home"?
I did not choose Glenstal Abbey as my home – in a sense, it chose me. I came here as a boy to school when I was twelve years of age, and apart from about ten years of my life spent in Africa, America and other parts of Europe, I have never lived anywhere else. So, I have become aware that this is a place which God has chosen as a dwelling-place, and it has been my good fortune to have been asked to make it my dwelling place, too. It only existed as a monastery thirty years before I arrived, so I will be able to show you the way it has developed during the eighty years of its existence as a house of God, a Domus Dei.
Interview with Maureen Murdock
by Lauren Yanks
JUNG IN IRELAND
"The Archetype of Home"
Dublin and County Galway, Ireland
March 26 - April 2, 2009
Below is an interview I conducted with Maureen Murdock, a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist as well as third generation Irish American. Former Chair and Core Faculty at the M.A. Counselling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Murdock is the author of the best-selling book, The Heroine’s Journey. Among her many other publications include Fathers’ Daughters; Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; The Heroine’s Journey Workbook, Spinning Inward, and “The Irish American Psyche”.
Murdock will be another presenter at the 2009 Jung in Ireland seminar. She will speak and run workshops entitled “The Irish American Psyche”, "The Journey Home: The Hero/Heroine’s Journey",” and “Writing Your Way Home”.
During the Great Hunger (1845-49) the population of Ireland was reduced from 8 million to 5 million people. 1.2 million people died of hunger, while 2 million more emigrated to the U.S. They left an agrarian culture for the fastest-growing industrializing society in the world. You say in your piece, “The Irish American Psyche” that while other groups considered themselves immigrants, the Irish considered themselves “exiles,” cut off by English landlords from their lands and communities. This affected—
and continues to affect—the Irish American experience in numerous ways.
You will be giving a workshop on these issues entitled “The Irish American Psyche”. Can you talk a bit about what you will be dealing with in that workshop?
In the workshop “The Irish American Psyche”, I am going to examine how exile has affected the Irish American psyche. Both Jung and Freud believed that individuals are destined to act out apocalyptic themes of ancient history that are handed down from generation to generation, not only through the institutions of society, but in the collective unconscious. At the core of the Irish American story is the longing for home and the unresolved questions relating to loss, place and identity. We will examine what our emotional inheritance is from our ancestors, both the positive—like poetry, drama, and song, as well as the negative—like addiction and depression. We’ll look at our own lives and ask: how and in what way do we still carry the longing for home?
I see you’re going to be giving a talk entitled “The Journey Home: The Hero/Heroine’s Journey.” Can you speak a little bit about that?
I’m going to be looking at what home is and our journey there. Home is not a static place—it’s a place of arrival, departure and return. I’ll examine the separation, trials and return home in the mythic tradition, focusing on “The Hero’s Journey” delineated by Joseph Campbell and illustrated with such tales as Odysseus, who was lost on land and sea for 10 years trying to return home, and “The Heroine’s Journey”, delineated by me in the book of the same title that describes the feminine journey, and the descent to the Underworld taken by Persephone and Inanna to reclaim the lost parts of her feminine psyche. In each case it’s a mythic search for home, both interior and exterior. I’ll examine the question: how do we return home?
What exactly is the heroine’s journey, and how does is differ—if at all—from the hero’s journey?
I will be going into the differences between the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey but, suffice it to say, the heroine’s journey describes the path many women and men in a patriarchal culture take to reclaim their connection with their spiritual nature. The heroine’s journey entails an initial separation from feminine values, succeeding within the values of a patriarchal culture, experiencing spiritual aridity and death, and finally turning inward to reclaim the power and spirit of the divine feminine. The final stages of the journey include redefining feminine values, healing the wounded masculine and finding balance within both aspects of our nature.
You will also be giving a workshop entitled, “Writing Your Way Home”. Can you talk a bit about that?
Writing about home gives the writer the opportunity to think about what home really means to them. Home is a rich topic to mine, particularly in memoir because people have so many complex feelings about home—whether it’s an actual place of our childhood or a place we long to create within ourselves. What makes home home? When someone is dying, why do they say I’m going home? How do we dream about home? What is the journey away from home and how do we return home? There are so many ways to approach it. Some people never leave home psychologically. For instance, in Vivian Gornick’s memoir, Fierce Attachments, she wrote, “I could not leave my mother because I became my mother”.
I teach memoir writing, so in this workshop there will be writing exercises to explore the theme of home, and we will read excerpts from memoirists who have written about home.
|
