An Evening With Roger Brooke: Psyche and Place

This seminar is a meditation on psyche and place, and on psyche as the gathering of a world. Geometric space becomes a psychological or meaningful place when it enters history and is carried in language and the human imagination. A number of Jung’s most charmingly imaginative writings on psyche and place, elaborated in “Mind and Earth” (CW10), for instance, form the context for this talk.  Our assumption is that Jung might have been empirically wrong, conceptually awkward, and embarrassingly prejudiced in these writings, but, as was so often the case, he was also “onto something.” Jung was often intuitively insightful but conceptually unable to formulate what he intuited. We shall try to do better! A short paper on my own experience with a Zulu diviner in the iMfolozi wilderness may be discussed. (It recounts the only truly “supernatural” experience I have had.)