Psychology on the Outside and Mythology On The Inside
Course Title:
Psychology on the Outside and Mythology On The Inside: An Archetypal Introduction to Depth Psychologies and Culture-making
Course ID:
JAN XXX
Instructors:
Brandon Williamscraig
Contact Email:
Course Description:
Human beings use and wander around in ideas big enough that they seem eternal and able to reproduce in endless variations. Some “archetypal” patterns have appeared in cultures around the world at least as long as there has been writing to memorialize the human experience. This course will surface personal and cultural narratives we develop and perpetuate in order to discover some of the ways we use the ideas we believe to make the world in which we live. Brother Camillus has agreed to visit lead us in meditations if he is available, but is not yet certain if he will be.
If we construct daily life based on the ideas we use, then our methods of interpreting and assigning meaning to experience are of profound importance and deserve careful study. At some point, an obligation arises for an adult to examine habits of thought, her own and then others’ relationships to cultural patterns and norms, and decide which beliefs and actions are best to repeat. This is the work to which the liberal arts are a prerequisite, and can lead to authentic citizenship through the practice of entertaining ideas as guests, relationships proposed by others.
We will pursue avenues of inquiry identified with C.G. Jung and several influenced by him, including Joseph Campbell, David Miller, Thomas Moore, and James Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology. Each studies psychology and mythology as though one were a language for the other, a way of connecting the worlds imagined as inside and outside the individual, so that it is possible to make both personal and collective choices which make specific lives, communities, and the world as a whole more beautiful and sustainable.
Human beings are not only architects of the cultures which make the world and daily life. We are also shaped by the habits, rituals, and structures we live through every day. This course will introduce archetypal meditations alongside art, social media, and corporate products. In counterpoint with introductory texts on mythopoetic hermeneutics, we will begin to surface and engage contemporary forces that influence belief and motivate social action, drive trends, create norms and public policy, and set the stage for the ways we entertain, categorize and stereotype, violate, love, and abandon each other, constructing lives with and without future generations in mind. There will be both examination and play.
Division:
Lower Division
Prerequisites:
None
Reading List:
Texts In Hand
Bruno Bettelheim, Freud And Man's Soul, selections
Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
William G Doty, Myth: A Handbook
James Hillman (with Thomas Moore), A Blue Fire, selections, and Healing Fiction
C.G. Jung, Jung on Christianity, selections, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections (with Jaffé)
David L. Miller, Facing Apocalypse, selections
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, selections
Articles, Essays, Exercises, Media, and Presentations
Articles and cartoons from the New Yorker, Atlantic, and other magazines
Brewster Y. Beach, "God as Trauma" presentation for the October 2002 Journey into Wholeness conference archived at http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/602-god-as-trauma
Brother Camillus Chavez FSC, audio meditations
http://www.brothercamillus.com/brcamillus/audio.php
James Hillman, selected essays from the Uniform Works
Videos [San Francisco, California, USA] Kanopy Streaming, 2014
James Hillman on Archetypal Psychotherapy
http://stmarysca.kanopystreaming.com.stmarys-ca.idm.oclc.org/video/james-hillman-archetypal-psychotherapy
James Hillman on the Soulless Society
http://stmarysca.kanopystreaming.com.stmarys-ca.idm.oclc.org/video/james-hillman-soulless-society?final=1
David L. Miller, selected essays
http://dlmiller.mysite.syr.edu/lectures.htm
Caroline Myss, "A Gallery of Archetypes”
http://www.myss.com/free-resources/sacred-contracts-and-your-archetypes/appendix-a-gallery-of-archtypes/
Basis for Final Grade:
Basis for Final Grade: one major 10-page paper or two minor papers, 5 pages each (40%); Quizzes (20%); Oral reports (20%); Engaged participation (20%)
Course Fee Per Student:
$10
Description of What the Course Fee Covers:
The course fee covers the production of readers.
Class Schedule:
MTuThF, 9:15 - 11:50 AM
Spaces reserved for freshmen:
7
Psychology on the Outside and Mythology On The Inside:
An Archetypal Introduction to Depth Psychologies and Culture-making
DRAFT Syllabus
St. Mary’s College - January Term 2017
Brandon Williamscraig Ph.D., instructor
Outcomes:
At the end of this course students will be able to
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Work critically with patterns often referred to as "archetypal" which recur across human cultural experience and are uniquely accessible to students of the liberal arts.
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Relate ideas associated with C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, William Doty, George Lakoff, and James Hillman having to do with the interrelationship of psychology and mythology.
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Have access to specific practices which connect critical thinking with "personal mythologies" and systemic value narratives.
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Deploy a mythopoetic social justice critique of contemporary culture vis–à–vis art, media, policy, and corporate products.
Core Curriculum Learning Goals
American Diversity
The student who connects critical thinking with "personal mythologies" and systemic value narratives must engage differences and note the generationally persistent dynamics which permeate belief narratives. In this course, ethnicity, race, class, and other categories often used to negatively discriminate are surfaced as roles and stereotypes, studied for the power they make available for both oppression and liberty, and included in strategies for encouraging the more humane treatment of self and other.
The reading, paper assignments, and examination requirements develop a critique of historical and fictional patterns at play specifically in the United States. The student cultivates diversity at the level of image, such that the social implications of an idea become sensible in the form of a rich, imaginal narrative. It becomes clearer what kind of story one is living in, and less problematic to figure out the ways in which this kind of story often plays out. In this way, the structures of power are laid bare and the effect of the beliefs behind the power-plays are easier to articulate. This articulation contributes to proposals that account for the social, role-based projections foisted upon both individual persons and the groups with which they are identified. Tropes like "Make America Great Again" cannot help but come under scrutiny.
Common Good
Critical work with archetypal patterns demands a perspective that is fundamentally communitarian, because making a case for ubiquity requires demonstrating recurrence across human cultures in the potentially fulfilling search for meaning. C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, William Doty, George Lakoff, and James Hillman all work at the intersection of psychology and mythography in order to propose thinking and actions that will forward a just social order, keeping in mind the abuses of narrative for political power that echo to this day. A mythopoetic critique of concrete social problems visible in contemporary media, policy, and corporate products allows for both the demonstration and evaluation of coherence analysis, and fruitful challenges to be offered as to the principles being practiced both in the choice of interpretive lense and in the formulation of conclusions.
I. MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES
Initial Archetypal Meditation Introduction
The real and fake stresses between theory and practice
Entertaining ideas as guests
Narrative conceptions, mythoclasm, and the myth of Myth
Mythopoiesis and Mythography
Dramatis Personae in the theoretical drama and the roles they play
Logistics:
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Announce plan for remainder of course - take questions on syllabus.
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Setting up for success. No gotcha.
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Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
II. PSYCHOLOGY AND DEPTH
Archetypal Meditation
Psyche and “Soul” in Freud, Jung, and Hillman
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
III. ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY
Archetypal Meditation
The history and critique of industrial psychologies
Archetypal Ambivalence and Autonomy
Imaginal, Mythological, Embodied/Sensual, Religious, Processual, Communitarian, and Dark Blue
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
IV. IMAGINATION, INTERPRETATION, AND HEALING FICTION
Archetypal Meditation
Hermeneutics, Literalism (and -isms, in general)
Facts about the fiction of consciousness, memory/biography, and the therapy of ideas
Associative Inquiry
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
V. DIFFERENCE AND CONFLICT
Archetypal Meditation
Liberal, Martial, and Performing Arts - Complementary Disciplines
Everything is a proposal
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
REFRAMING ASSIGNMENT
VI. CULTURE-MAKING
Archetypal Meditation
What they believed, as evidenced in their media, and what that belief made.
Fingers pointing at the moon are not the moon, but can still give you the finger.
Taking stories as seriously as belief.
Culturopoiesis
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
VII. CIVILIZATION AND THE PROCESS ARTS
Archetypal Meditation
Inner-Outer narratives of categorical discrimination and the tyranny of systems
Group process design and facilitation
Helping the arc of history bend toward justice
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
VIII. CARE FOR THE SOUL OF THE WORLD
Archetypal Meditation
Therapeutic fantasies, neuroses, and suicidal tendencies on an epic scale
Acting out dilemmas, Media Superheroland and Apocalypse
Technopathy and Ecocide
Humane-isms and the Soul of the World
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
IX. CITIZENSHIP, POWER, AND LEADERSHIP
Archetypal Meditation
Fantasies of coercion and freedom
Enfranchisement and Entitlement
Rules Golden And Otherwise--the making and breaking thereof
Organization and Management
Kingdom Come
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
REFRAMING ASSIGNMENT DUE
X. PRACTICING THE MYTH OF PEACE
Archetypal Meditation
Globalization and Empire
Activism, Demonstration, Protest, Futility, and Utopias
Community and World Citizenship
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
XI. CONCLUSIONS AND RE-THINKING
Archetypal Meditation
Frameworks for ongoing Associative Inquiry
Invitations to consider new and related work at St. Mary’s and beyond
Cultivating doubts and disobedience of the most faithful kind
Seminar discussion of reading
Practice with specific contemporary content
Reading assignment informed by this session and preparing for the next.
XII. TBA (over-run buffer)
Archetypal Meditation
Student Choice discussion of any reading (lead by instructor)
Practice with specific contemporary content
Impromptu or optional reading assignment
XIII. DIALOGUE
Archetypal Meditation
Student Lead Discussion of anything relevant
(Practice with specific contemporary content)
No reading assignment
XIV. PUTTING IT TO THE TEST - A
Silence
Demonstrations and Presentations
XV. PUTTING IT TO THE TEST - B
Final papers due
Demonstrations and Presentations
XVI. ENDING
Debrief and Celebration