Sadly Jerome Bernstein died on 22 January 2023. His stature in the Jungian world is hard to overstate and his legacy is a treasure that we will draw on for decades.
Jerome was born and grew up in Washington. His early career was in the federal government eventually becoming Deputy Director of Manpower Training programs in the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity. He started his own consultancy firm and was approached by the Chairman of the Navajo Nation invited Jerome to become a consultant to assist with the development of a tribal Division of Education as well as being the Tribe’s registered lobbyist on Capitol Hill.
In 1971, he, along with a business partner, founded a new social science consulting firm, RJ Associates, through which he contracted with the Navajo nation. That same year, Native American tribes were given the right to take over the administration of selected programs from the federal government under the Indian Self-Determination Act. Within weeks, the Chairman of the Navajo Nation invited Jerome to become a consultant to assist with the development of a tribal Division of Education as well as being the Tribe’s registered lobbyist on Capitol Hill. This one-week consulting assignment turned into a six-year professional relationship with the Navajo Tribe. He has maintained a thirty-five year relationship with friends and professionals and has been working to bring the wisdom of Navajo and Western healing together in a collaborative clinical model.
Through his contacts with the Navajo Nation, and particularly Carl N. Gorman, the Tribe’s Director of the Office Native Healing Sciences, Jerome was exposed to Navajo religion and healing. This had a profound effect on him, and he began to have healing dreams that involved Navajo and Hopi medicine men. At the time, he explored these dreams in his Jungian analysis. Over time, he realized that these dreams were leading him onto a new path: he was to become a Jungian analyst. In 1980, he graduated from the C. G. Jung Institute in New York, becoming a Jungian analyst.
He has been in private practice since 1974. He was the founding president of the C. G. Jung Analysts Association of the Greater Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area, vice-president of the C. G. Jung Institute of New York, and past-president of the C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe. He is currently on the teaching faculty of the C. G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe.
He is author of Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma (Routledge, 2005). This paradigm-shifting book deals with the evolution of Western consciousness and the emergence of what he calls the ‘Borderland,’ a spectrum of transrational reality that may enable new possibilities for understanding and healing our relationship with Nature.
Interviews with Jerome: