THE POWER OF SYMBOLS AND THE POETICS OF PEACE – CONNECTING THE PERSONAL, POLITICAL AND COSMIC

The seminar will explore the significance of Jung’s notion of the ‘uniting symbol’ not just in relation to personal trauma but also in relation to the healing of the body politic. With reference to Jung’s distinctive thinking around the efficacy of the symbol based in his experience described in The Red Book, we will consider and observe the conditions required for the uniting symbol to arise not just in the consulting room but in communities, and the poetic and political imagination required to allow it to happen.

The paper will draw parallels between the apparently irresolvable conflict in Ireland and the contemporary global scene where competing truth claims lead to a break down in social trust, diminish our capacity to think and speak, and engender cycles of violence. Jung warned us ’not to be indifferent to the poets’, since ’they create from he very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream’ (CW VI, 323). With special reference to unfolding peace process in Northern Ireland the seminar will note how Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney embodied that function. The talk will also bring an intimate and personal perspective on the making of a Jungian Analyst by one who born and raised in Belfast at the height of the civil strife known as ‘The Troubles’.