Abstract of opening remarks by George Callan, Ph.D., for the July 23, 2004 session of the Psyche and the Spirit of the Times discussion.
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.
—C.G. Jung
In the life of an individual, the work of soul making is often revealed in the presence of crisis. Latent symptoms, once carefully hidden in the structure of the ego arise from this solitary and particular suffering to become the source material from which an alchemical transformation is forged. Deconstruction, dissociation, and annihilation take place in this crucible of individuation. The old vessel gives way, and familiar notions of identity, relationship, security and containment must be abandoned. Empowered by the imagination, reveries of grief and loss, hope and desire emerge from the shards of the old life. And so it is in the soul work of nations.
On a bright September morning in the year 2001, the United States of America experienced a soul event that would herald the beginning of a fierce and necessary alchemical process. As the ash of destruction fell on the land, our tribal and instinctual knowing drew us together in a million gestures of compassion, solidarity, and grief. In the days, weeks, and months to follow, people everywhere picked up their pens, their cameras, and their musical instruments, and began to give expression to this pathos, shaping living reveries from the tangled steel of the American psyche. Ordinary spaces became receptacles for handmade shrines and memorials. A conversation was taking place between the sensate surface of events and the archetypal reality—between the phenomenal and the numinal. Communities and nations around the world responded to our loss like family members and good neighbors, gathering to pray and sing and cry for us, lighting candles and sending messages of compassion and concern. A window was opening—a golden possibility that we might tap into a global heartbeat, grounded not in the marketplace or on the battleground, but in the precinct of eros.
These potent seedlings of communitas were forced underground by our cultural symptoms of retribution, nationalism, racism, isolationism, and “bullyism.” In the systemic extortion of our communal memory orchestrated by our government and powered by mainstream media, America’s interrupted images and reveries have slipped into the underworld. Crouching there, they await a time when our sincere encounters with darkness, fear, anger, shame, and death coax them back into consciousness. If transformation takes place in the passageway between the reveries of the past and their retrieval in the present, then the work before us is to reanimate our collective memory and uncover what lies hidden beneath the devastation and cruelty of war and oppression. We gather in conversation in the presence of the possibility that we might regain our sense of communitas and reclaim our soulful reveries, in the context of a world straining toward consciousness.
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