This innovative volume on the mourning process, burial rites and intimations of immortality offers diverse Jungian, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, depth-psychological perspectives, written predominantly by graduates and candidates of the CG Jung Institute Zürich.
The themes of this book are particularly relevant as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic and other environmental disasters, when so many people die without a proper burial and are, thus, not properly commemorated with their status value. The contributors cover a wide range of subjects from their clinical observations attached to grief and loss in the prolonged mourning process, the meaning behind burial rites in cyclical and linear temporalities and an analysis of why certain dead are excluded from becoming ancestors. Unconscious processes such as dreams, archetypes and cultural complexes from the personal and collective unconscious are also presented and explored.
This collection will be of great interest to interdisciplinary academic researchers, Jungian analysts and students, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, anthropologists, cultural theorists and students interested in the mourning process, rites of passage, past and present burial practices and the imaginative, symbolic significance of the land of the dead.
Table of Contents:
Introduction Part 1: Cross cultural, liminal relations with the dead 1. Day of the dead in Los Angeles as numinosum 2. A comparative, ethnographic study of the journey to the land of the dead 3. Crossing the bridge to uncertainty, a life with death and the dead Part 2: Pandemics and access to immortality 4. Splintered Afterlives: Aids, death and beyond 5. C.G. Jung, Gloria Anzaldua and social activisim's possibility Part 3: Burial rituals: crossing over 6. Bardo, Noh Play and zeitgerist in Japan 7. Pandemic, the zenith of an archetypal disconnection Part 4: Grief, mourning and loss: clinical dimensions 8. The problem of death and meaning for depth psychology 9. When the mourning process needs psychiatric support Part 5: Eros, death and the unconscious 10. Deceased loved ones in dreams 11. Immortaliy, mourning, and ritual Part 6: Towards an archetypal ontology of death 12. The seduction of immortality: Jung, Heidegger, and Hegel on death 13. Destiny and personal myth: archetypal constellations of the soul Part 7: Psycho-social dimensions of grief and the mourning process 14. Opening the eyes to invisible people 15. The Katako syndrome: Japan's problem with youth suicide
About the Author :
Elizabeth Brodersen, PhD, is an accredited Jungian Training Analyst and Supervisor at the CGJI Zürich and currently a member of the Institute’s Research Commission. Elizabeth received her doctorate in psycho-social psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex, UK, and works as a Jungian analyst in a private practice in Germany and Switzerland.
Review :
"This is a remarkable collection of essays on our relations with the dead and the mourning process. The authors are wide-ranging in their areas of expertise, drawing from social anthropology, history, philosophy, Jungian studies, and psychoanalysis, but together they provide both broad and penetrating insight into this most personal of our universally human concerns. Dr Brodersen is to be commended for this fine contribution to Thanatology studies."
Dr Roger Brooke, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Jungian scholar, Duquesne University, author of Jung and Phenomenology.
"Like the vegetative nervous system that regulates digestion, heart rate and breathing without our having to think about them, many of our rituals of mourning operate beneath the surface to smooth the passages of life to death. This daring and complex volume explores those rituals and passages from many cultures intended to move us from this life to the next, although the transition is often seen to be anything but effortless for the living and the dead."
Thomas Singer, MD. Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychoanalyst, editor of the award-winning Cultural Complexes and The Soul of America
"Jungian analysts and scholars have come together in this rich and creative collection to explore the universal facets of death, dying and the mourning processes that affect all of us. The content will appeal to therapists working with the archetypal in grief and dreams of the dead. Equally, those interested in the historic terrain of the land of the dead and burying rituals will find an anthropological sensibility to the topics. The collection is a significant contribution that expands collective psychoanalytic knowledge by assisting clients to traverse these experiences around death. This will inevitably become a seminal collection and resource in future for Jungians."
Dr Stephani Stephens, Psychotherapist and a lecturer in Counselling at the University of Canberra in Canberra, Australia and author of C.G.Jung and the Dead; Visions, Active Imagination and the Unconscious Terrain.
"The wide-spread contents and different perspectives on death, mourning processes, burial rituals and intimations of immortality assembled in this book address various cross-cultural approaches to various aspects of death. As an archetypal experience, death has and will always raise many unanswered questions that challenge all of us. The present book is an attempt to address these issues from a Jungian point of view. Each author gives profound insight based on his or her personal field of interest and is written from the heart. This is indeed a courageous book that will help the reader to confront difficult issues and find a larger view on a life experience that is often feared, but inevitable."
Evy Tausky, Jungian Training Analyst and Supervisor, President of the Curatorium of the C.G. Jung-Institute, Zürich
