This presentation will consider Shadow in Western Culture’s complex relationship with nature and natives; it will use Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Ceremony, to illustrate aspects of the cultural complexes involved and it will consider how these literary works represent healing.

As a literary scholar and not a clinician, I use stories as case studies to provide insights about psychological dynamics.  I am specifically interested in Eco psychology, or the complex relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world.  Western culture has developed powerful technologies in part by creating a psychological divide between the human and “nature” which allows us to see other forms of life as resources for our use.  As a consequence, I believe, we have evolved what I think of as a relatively impermeable membrane between the unconscious and the ego, with a corresponding over-reliance on the reasoning faculty and a distancing from ways of knowing that are more intuitive or feeling.    In this talk I will look at a classic of Western culture and a recent novel by an American Indian (Pueblo) writer to explore areas of cultural complex and some deep similarities.  If you are interested, you can find some of this material in my book, Out of the Shadow:  Eco psychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land.