Dreams, Dialogue and
Embodied
Wholeness
Explorations at the
Edge of Concept and Experience
Image from C.G. Jung
Redbook
THE LIFWYNN FOUNDATION
FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
84th
Anniversary Conference
C. G. Jung Foundation
Trigant Burrow, M.D., Ph.D.,
who was a founder and one-time president of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, created The Lifwynn Foundation, and
pioneered investigations into the social implications of neurosis and the
biological causes of conflict. His group- analytic research, later called
social self-inquiry (SSI), was a forerunner of current group therapies.
SSI provides us an
opportunity to explore in ourselves the alienation, conflict, and hostility now
rampant in society. We experiment with a unique form of
direct communication and dialogue that enhances the knowledge of who we are and deepens our relationships.
SSI is a group process in which we
share recognition of our individual but culturally rooted attitudes and
behaviors. This brings an understanding of ourselves
that can result in a sense of solidarity with others in the group - and the
sense that this solidarity extends to all humans.
The process also offers a somatic
approach in which connectedness among human beings can be experienced in the
whole body- mind. The practice of immediate attention to bodily reactions
can bring a release from both the mental and physical tension caused by the
domination of our consciousness by language, and the consequent dissociation of
our awareness of our body.
A primary goal of SSI is a shift from
the "normal," self-absorbed form of consciousness, which Burrow
called "ditention," to an organic
consciousness, a way of experiencing oneself, others, and the world through a
sense of one's body and an awareness of our being an integral part of the
wholeness of the universe, "cotention."
SSI is closely associated with David Bohm's Dialogue groups. Bohm had a strong influence on
members of the Lifwynn Foundation through his writing, a relationship with
Steve Rosen, and participation in a Lifwynn conference on addiction.
In Bohmian Dialogue there is no predefined purpose, no agenda, other than that of inquiring into the
movement of thought, and exploring the process of "thinking together"
collectively. This activity can allow group participants to examine their
preconceptions, suspend their projections and beliefs about others, and open
their biases to scrutiny and evaluation, as
well as, to explore the more general movement of thought.
Friday, October 29
Trigant Burrow established the Lifwynn Foundation as a medium for exploring
humanity's relationship to our physical and social environments. He did
extensive research on our experience of our body and the role it plays in our
subjective and interpersonal processes. This led to the discovery of an
integrated mode of attention he called cotention
and a group dialogue process, social self-inquiry.
When
a dream is selected for exploration, the dreamer describes the dream; the group
can ask clarifying questions; the group members make the dream their own;
events and the emotional context of the dream are explored; a playback and
review of the dream occurs; orchestrating projections of the dream are given;
and the dreamer then has the last word about the dream.
12;00
Lunch
The Dance of Three offers an intimate exploration of
three dimensions of inner and outer experience: Dancer/Mover, Mirror, and
Container. The Dancer allows the impulses arising in the body to move
him or her. The Mirror attends to the Dancer's process and mirrors the
"dance" both concretely and energetically. The Container holds
presence for both of them, sends unconditional love to the Dancer, and
makes sure the Dancer is physically safe. After each round there is time for
writing or artwork and for discussion among the three.
The Order-Disorder Paradox: Creating Order
in a Psychic System requires a concomitant creation of Disorder. This will be elaborated from a scientific, mythological
and aperspectival point of view. Clinical
material will be a central focus of the presentation.
Saturday, October 30
Sensory Awareness is an integral aspect of the group work of the
Lifwynn Foundation. The practice of sensory awareness facilitates
development of the capacity to integrate our mind and our body. Some
sensory awareness experiments will be carried out to demonstrate the process.
C. G. Jung devoted much of his life to exploring the dark borderland between psyche and matter. While engaged in that inquiry, he was drawn to the phenomena of contemporary physics and to the groundbreaking work of physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Just what is it about modern physics that invites intimate contact with the psyche? In pondering this question, we discover the broader need to set physics and psychology on a new philosophical foundation, one more in keeping with the integrative worldview of alchemy studied by Jung, than with the dualistic paradigm of conventional science. This revolutionary development is foreshadowed in several of Pauli's dreams and the session begins and ends by contemplating two of them.
Ernest
Sherman
In
dealing with the crucial contemporary problem of subject vs. object, Western
thinkers have sought to reduce the subjective order to the objective order, or
vice versa; or else, dualistically, they would split subject and object by
containing them within two mutually exclusive containers. Yet there is an
ambiguity in this quest that seems to argue against it. For, in thinking about
the world, we find that there is no clear-cut boundary between it and we who
think. As a consequence, any attempt to banish this interactive overlapping
must apparently assume it. What this means is that our containment vessels are
leaky in principle and flow into each other — a situation that can only be
approached by paradoxically returning to ourselves. Let us accordingly
fit the medium to the message and explore this paradox together.
In this workshop we will use Montague Ullman's
experiential dream group process to help a volunteer dreamer to connect with
his or her presented dream. The Ullman method
promotes discovery and understanding through a number of discrete stages, which
include: group projections into the dream's feelings and metaphors (as if
the dream were our own), attentive, empathic listening to the dreamer's
responses, and dialogue about the dream's context and imagery by means of open,
non-leading questions. The dreamer alone decides upon the level of sharing,
and the group has no other agenda than to assist the dreamer in receiving the
gifts offered by the dream itself.
We
will conduct an enactment of the relation of space, subject, and object in the
current paradigm and then in the new emerging scientific paradigm, paying
particular attention to how we relate to each element and allow it to relate to
us. Lastly we will examine the ways our language constrains those relationships
and speculate on ways to linguistically loosen those constraints.
Each
birth is an important arrival. We are each and all born in the flesh of the
world--emissaries of the self-evolving cosmos. "Our experience starts with
a sense of power. Power is the compulsion of composition. It constitutes the
drive of the Universe." (Whitehead) All actual
occasions of our awaring–all that we were in the
field of our pre-natal experience and onward throughout our lives–are important
arrivals. The emergence of lightspeed
technologies in the 19th century coincides with an emergent mode of awareness
that I characterize as cinemaesthesia. Children born
in the 21st century experience the actual occasions of the cinemaesthetic
field as naturally as taking their first breaths. My presentation serves
awareness of these important arrivals. I will link the cinemaesthetic
theory to the thinking of Whitehead, Gebser, Jung, Burrow, the new physics as presented in the work of Steven
Rosen, and others, to describe five transformational modes of awareness:
archaic > proprioceiving
magical > mimesis (imitating, metaphorizing)
mythical > diegesis (narrating, storytelling)
mental > analysis (identifying objects-in-space-before-subject)
integral > cinemaesthesis (integrating
discontinuities)
Sunday, October 31
Jung
was encouraging us to explore what Burrow called "the social
neurosis" when he wrote, "If you imagine someone who is brave enough
to withdraw all projections, then you get an
individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. . Such a man knows that
whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if
he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the
world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the
gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day." Bodymindfulness
can help us explore these charged connections we make when attributing
unconscious parts of ourselves to others. Bodymindfulness
is the process of attending to all aspects of the bodymind—body, emotion, mind, and spirit—in order to grasp
the holistic personal meaning of an internal event and to use the resultant
understanding to communicate skillfully. Bodymindfulness
focuses us at a deep, prereflective level where we
can begin to understand the sources of our perceptions, interpretations, and
behavior and to recognize how our whole self is communicating and emerging in
our presence.
Languaging can hint at/point to "the much more" of our vast intricate
moment by moment experiencing, beyond what we can consciously know. You and I
can learn a special kind of listening in partnership to follow these
breadcrumbs of meaning, tapping into the ever changing wild singularity of each
other, keeping each other company as we touch, see and hear from "the
person in there," the one who looks back at us, beyond inside and outside,
before, without, with, and after language.
This
presentation is dedicated to the late Montague Ullman,
a great friend and mentor to many in the dream community. An
unforgettably human, human being, he is known for his pioneering efforts in
dream sharing, his work in telepathic dreaming and his theory based on the
relationship of quantum physics to dreaming. Later in his life, Monte was
inspired by the work of physicist David Bohm. In his
last paper, "In Search of a New Abode," Monte described dreaming as a
relay station with input from two orders: the Implicate Order of
wholeness, which involves everything that exists in the universe, including
dreaming consciousness and the Explicate Order – or waking consciousness – in
which "All That Is" unfolds from the Implicate. This theory has
influenced the dreams I'm about to share with you as they actualize the
relationship between the two orders -- Monte's relay station.
In creating Psychodrama, Jacob L. Moreno integrated
his practice of psychiatry with the vitalizing techniques of the theater
arts. Psychodramatic dream work involves the
enactment of a dream as if it were a play. Guided by the director, the
Dreamer will have the opportunity to role-play, and thus embody, the
characters and objects that appeared in his or her dream. Other group
members may also be asked to play roles in the dream drama. The act of
role-playing engages the whole person – thoughts, feelings, body, and
soul. In this process, the Dreamer is respected as the sole author
and interpreter of his dream. The group provides support and a safe
container for the Dreamer's exploration.
Return to the Main Page