Depth Psychology and
Giftedness: Bringing Soul to the
Field of Talent
Development and Giftedness
F. Christopher Reynolds & Jane Piirto
Published in Roeper Review
Manuscript submitted September 9, 2003.
Revision accepted January 20, 2004.
164/Roeper
Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 Roeper Review
Spring 2005, Vol. 27, No. 3, 164-171.
Abstract
While the field of gifted education has
relied on educational, cognitive, counseling, behavioral, developmental, and
social psychology, the domain of depth psychology offers special insights into
giftedness, especially with regard to individuation. The notion of passion, or
the thorn (J. M. Piirto, 1999, 2002), the incurable
mad spot (F. C. Reynolds1997, 2001), the acorn (J. Hillman, 1996, 1999), the daimon (C. G. Jung, 1965); the importance of integration through
the arts and through dreams; the existence of the collective unconscious; the
presence of archetypes; and the transcendent psyche—all have resonance with the
binary etymological idea of “gift” as both blessing and poison. Depth
psychology offers a way of understanding that is physical, psychological, and
spiritual.
F. Christopher Reynoldsis
a teacher and singer-songwriter. He teaches French and creativity
in
(www.urrealist.com).
E-mail: spiriman@aol.com
Jane Piirto is
Trustees' Professor, Director of Talent Development Education, at
Whether he understands
them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of archetypes, because in
it he is still a part of Nature and is connected to his own roots. A view of
the world or a social order that cuts him off from the primordial images of
life not only is no culture at all but, in an increasing degree is a prison or
a stable. If the primordial images remain conscious in one form or another, the
energy that belongs to them can flow freely into man...I am far from wishing to
belittle the divine gift of reason, man’s highest faculty. But in the role of
absolute tyrant, it has no meaning-- no more than light would have in a world
where its counterpart, darkness, is absent...the rational is counterbalanced by
the irrational, and what is planned and purposed by what is. (Jung, 1959, p. 23)
In the above quote, written more than 50
years ago, C. G. Jung expressed the need for the archetypal, symbolic dimension
to life lest it become like a prison or a stable. Yet, archetypes and
psychologies that include them remain marginalized, often unknown in the field
of talent development and giftedness. The psychological ground of the field has
been dominated by clinical, behavioral, developmental, and multiple educational
psychologies of learning styles, intelligences, and brain chemistries. At
first, that list seems extensive, but in fact, all of them are ego psychologies
and their central focus gathers around what Jung called “the divine gift of
reason” in the opening quotation. Allowing waking consciousness to furnish our
only psychological point of view holds our educational efforts to a fixed way
of seeing, of feeling, of knowing and of understanding in such a way that it
unexpectedly restricts the very innovation, imagination and creativity that we
wish to cultivate in our programs. Acknowledging what is below the surface,
beyond the ego, broadens the possibilities for educating.
Definition of Depth Psychology
The term depth psychology is the container for a number of psychologies that
concern themselves with the unconscious. Though its existence was known and
utilized by mesmerists and hypnotists (Meissner,
2000; Robertson, 1995), the unconscious gained its first scientific foothold in
modern times with Freud. However, the psyche recovered its greater depths in
Jungian psychology, Hillman’s (1975) archetypal psychology, Sardello’s
(1996) spiritual psychology, and Roszak’s (1992) ecopsychology. In all, the rational, intentional human
mind, waking consciousness, or gift of reason, is only one player in a much
larger field of consciousness. The reason for the present conceptual paper is
that, while most people acknowledge that there are depths, and while they seem
to yearn for connection with these, the current educational scene steers away
from such, except in advanced studies of philosophy, literature, and clinical
psychologies. Depth psychology approaches human experience with a view towards
multiple interpretations and expressions. Depth psychology could be called
postmodern in its intricacies. Writers and thinkers in the depth psychological
and postmodern mode have given voice to ancient complexities only now beginning
to resurface from the depths. The works of J. K. Rowling have permitted the
return of magic, mystery, and arcane delights to children’s literature
(personal communication, Stephanie S. Tolan, November
15, 2003). The surprise best-seller The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown (2003), has given the study
of symbols new life. And, as
Depth psychologists believe that the ego
consciousness, our daytime “I,” is not the master of the psychological house.
They feel this was proven early on by the word association tests (Jung, 1910,
1970), where the individual, after an initial ease with associating words with
given prompts, would begin to take extra long for some responses, draw blanks,
give answers that rhymed. The unexpected or what went wrong, when taken
together would often exhibit a thematic quality, be connected to returning
emotions, memories, repressed instincts, which came to be known as the
complexes. The word association tests demonstrated that in spite of our
intentions, something other, not known to the daytime “I,” could interfere and
participate in our behavior. Over the years, the
metaphoric characters and the inner dramas
of the complexes led psychologists to call their approach to the psyche a
“poetic basis of mind” (Hillman, 1975, p. xi).
Since the appearance of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, the
existence of the unconscious has held as a psychological fact. The exact nature
of what is in the unconscious is what distin guishes the different depths of the depth psychologies. For
Freud, the unconscious contained various forms of instinct and memory in the
form of complexes, a personal unconscious that had
emotional and somatic/physical attributes.
For Jung (1959), that personal unconscious rested upon an even deeper layer,
the collective unconscious or the objective psyche, which was far more ancient
than an individual lifetime and contained the primordial images, the
archetypes. The archetypes featured not only emotional and somatic attributes,
but also spiritual and worldly attributes that appeared in vision, dream and
synchronicity. Synchronicity is
Jung’s word for the meaningful coincidences that are part and parcel of deep psychological
experience. For Jung, the objective psyche also contained a guiding, organizing
center, the Self, very much like the Hindu Parusha,
the God Within. Hillman (1975) wished to keep psychology free from the
dogmatism of Jung’s Self. He said that our psychological depths do contain
archetypes, but they are best served by an understanding that respects their
full autonomy. In other words, for Hillman, the depths are polycentric and if
there is a Self, we honor it best by not dictating how it should behave.
Hillman pushes archetypal theory to its fullest stature. For him, an archetype
and a God, in the classic (e.g., Grecian or polytheistic) sense of the word,
are the same. Additionally, he prefers the word soul to the words personal or collective unconscious. Hillman
amplified the term “soul” by using these related words: “mind, spirit, heart,
life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence,
innermost purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God”
(Hillman, 1964, p. 44). Sardello (1996), wished to
free the soul from Hillman’s thought. In particular, he sought freedom from the
idea of an archetypal soul rooted in Hellenistic culture. For Sardello, the imaginal capacity
of our beings is best honored when it serves not so much the past Gods or the
Self. The soul seeks to cocreate with the world a
deeper cultural future, based as much as possible in Love. He pointed out that
“for people who lived in times past, care of the soul was natural and
instinctual, carried through ritual, ceremony, mystery centers, an oral
tradition of story, myth, and art” (p. 7). Finally, although he might not
strictly be called a depth psychologist, Roszak
(1992) wishes to return the depth recovered through humanity to nature and the
cosmos. He makes the assertion that the environmental health of the planet and
human psychological health are in relation with each other, that one will not
be whole without the other. He suggests that humankind has been collectively
insane in its treatment of the biosphere. Roszak
asserts that we have immense power to harm what we need in order to live, and
we continue to harm the earth. This indicates that the culture ” is mad with
the madness of a deadly compulsion that reaches beyond our own kind to all the
brute innocence about us” (p. 70).
Although present in Jung, Hillman and Sardello, Roszak’s (1992)
assertion that human psychology is embedded in nature represents a full return
of soul in the form of the world soul, or Anima Mundi.
Roszak saw the Jungian idea of the collective
unconscious as the “most serviceable in the creation of an ecopsychology”
(p. 302). Today we call this theory Gaia. Earth itself is a living being and
through our becoming conscious, she becomes conscious: “the collective
unconscious, at its deepest level, shelters the compacted ecological
intelligence of our species, the source from which culture finally unfolds as
the self-conscious reflection of nature’s own steadily emergent mindlikeness” (p. 301).
Why Educators Should Be Interested in Depth Psychology
The depths should interest us as educators
for three reasons. The first concerns the value we place upon our work. In all,
even in Freud, as Bettleheim (1983) noted, depth
psychology is a care of soul. With soul as the central factor, education
returns to its deepest root, educare, a leading out
from lesser meanings to deeper ones, from lesser connectedness to greater
connectedness, from naïve shallowness to the deep experience of being alive
that Joseph Campbell spoke of so often (see
The second reason for us to be interested
in the depths of depth psychology concerns the biographical and
autobiographical. Depth psychology increases our capacity to understand and
respect the psychological experiences common to the lives of the talented and
gifted, namely those heights and depths of mood, inspirations, dreams, oceanic
and transcendent moments, insights, intuitions, spiritual visitations (Aziz, 1990), the slings and arrows of outrageous mental
states, even unto bouts of unexplainable somatic symptoms, of mental illness,
of compulsiveness, hyperdriven self-destructiveness,
bipolar disorder and suicide attempts (Piirto, 1998a,
2002, 2004, 2005, in press, in preparation). In our test-driven and socially
constructed definitions of who is or who is not gifted and talented, we lose
sight of the mystery of exceptionality in people. No one can really understand
this mystery, and we reduce it when we try to put a test score to it. The Dabrowski Theory of Positive Disintegration (1965)
explains, in a hierarchical model, the various levels of adult development, but
these levels, too, are reductive when used to explain instead of understand.
Depth psychological approaches to the mystery of giftedness and talent honor
the unknown, with its shadows and deep wells beneath the surface, and do not
rest on the merely quantifiable.
The third reason educators should be
interested in depth psychology concerns our capacity to perceive and honor
genius in a way proper to it. We use the term “genius” because it is used by
most depth psychology thinkers as interchangeable with the term “daimon.” All the names given to the quality of genius over
the years indicate an “other,” who is the protector of our reason for being. It
is this daimon (Cobb, 1992; Hillman, 1996, 1999;
Jung, 1965; Moore, 1994; Myss, 2001), this Thorn (Piirto, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2002, 2004, 2005, in
preparation), this Incurable Mad Spot, (Reynolds, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2004,
2005), which can be best understood when seen archetypally,
not only as the presence of physical prowess and genes, not only in the
presence of drive, resilience, heroic strivings, but also in our pathologies,
crimes, accidents, chance, spiritual visitations, experiences of being in the
hands of a higher power, positive disintegrations, dark nights of the soul, or
the madness that comes when the Muse speaks (Dabrowski,
1965;
Education as Educare: The Return of
the Soul
When we as educators seek to educate with
soul in mind, a radical spark is struck. Hillman (1983) pointed out “by
definition, education must lead out” (p. 179). He suggested that educators lead
the child out by leading the child in, by focusing on the imagination in the
child’s fantasies. He urges the education of the imagination. Hillman (1975),
in Re-visioning Psychology, was most
pointed and succinct in his description of soul. He asks psychology to return
to the deepest root of its own meaning, the psyche of psychology. As educators,
the depths bring us to reconsider the deepest root of the meaning of teaching,
our own educare, in the Platonic sense. As noted
above, to lead out from makes the most sense when we speak of it with soul in
mind. From soul’s perspective, the individual comes with the task of perceiving
and bringing into the world that which only he or she can bring, even unto what
the Greeks called mediation, in the sense of embodying prophetic capacity. Joan
of Arc, Ghandi, Krishnamurti,
those who Simonton (1995) called the eminent, who Nietzsche (Heidegger, 1990)
calls the great man, have a place in soul’s classroom. The cosmos can be known
as the immensely creative, ongoing work of art that it is. With soul comes a
realization that creating, directing, and maintaining programs of talent
development are what the ancients called eldering.
Thus, they are cultural work, a care for the indigenous culture to be
considered in relation with the village’s joy in living. In traditional
cultures, this individual’s selfapprehension through
experience that s/he had a soul and a deep calling in life was done through
rites of passage. In those rites, the student was helped to move from the world
of childhood into the world of adult relationships. With soul comes the higher
orders of human consciousness, namely contemplation; reflection; intuition; metacognition; knowing the true, the beautiful, and the
just; dreaming; and imagining with arts-based, philosophical, ethical and
social justice curricula that feature a capacity for sufficient depth and
complexity. With soul comes creativity and reverence for creation in its
deepest sense.
Lastly, and leading into our next section,
with the perspective of soul comes a foundation that holds a mature respect for
the darker side of human nature. Such an eye has seen what Hillman means when
he writes, “The psyche does not exist without pathologizing”
(1975, p. 70). As teachers of the gifted and talented, we can acquire the eye
that can see in the dark from experiences with these students over the years,
from speaking with others, and from biographical studies (e.g., the Goertzel [1962, 1978] studies; Gruber’s [1982] studies). We
often find the presence of traumas, mental illnesses, crimes, and afflictions
accompanying eminence. For better or worse, bad things happen to good people.
Biographies of certain creative productive adults, especially in the fields of
visual arts, creative writing, mathematics, music, and theater show that some
spent time in the psychiatric ward, in the hospital emergency room, in the
prison, sometimes at the funeral home (Piirto,
1998b). Piirto jokingly, yet seriously, tells parents
who want their children to become creative adults that the studies show the
best thing they could do is “get divorced or die” (p. 342).
Depth acquainted with the dark is not naïve
about creativity. Creativity is not all light, warm and fuzzy activities
infused into content lessons; it is not described by lines and charts; it is
not putting on silly costumes and telling jokes; it is not self-esteem exercises,
nor fluency and other cognitive divergent production exercises. Creativity is
not always friendly. It is sometimes autistic, bent on harming, turned against
life, death-bringing, even satanic. With soul comes the knowledge that
giftedness is something we have to wrestle with in our hearts, something that
shapes us as much as we shape it. Giftedness takes us out of the comfort zone. Marsilio Ficino (1489), the
translator of alchemical texts, of the lost books of Plato, the teacher who
introduced to the West the ideas that would bring forth the Renaissance in
Florence, Italy, models a master educator’s attitude toward the pathologizing inherent to soul when he advises, “there is
nothing so deformed in this whole living world that it has no soul, no gift of
soul contained in it” (p. 86).
For us, as educators of the gifted and
talented, this means that when we consider our curricula and our educational
systems, we must also listen carefully in the places where the progress is
disrupted and where the process breaks down. Where schooling gets deformed
isn’t to be too quickly cured with Ritalin, Zithromax,
behavior modifications, detentions and expulsions without temperance based on
the knowledge that soul is also breaking forth precisely at that same place
where the educational process is pathologized. In
fact, where our work gets deformed is often where soul makes its first claim on
how education should proceed and how a deeper psychological perspective is
being requested.
Gifted and Talented: An Archetypal Perspective
Part and parcel of the tradition of soul
elucidated above, a tradition that can be traced back through Plotinus, Plato, through Heraclitis,
comes a very high esteem for humanity and the cosmos. Soul mediates between
spirit qualities, which Ficino (1980) calls “divine,”
and physical qualities, which the renaissance doctor calls “fallen.” Ficino and other Renaissance thinkers made a psychological
breakthrough in that they saw humanity and the cosmos as tri-partite, body,
soul, spirit (see Figure 1). We lost this useful description in the process of
the Enlightenment, with the myth that scientific materialism could solve all,
that “progress” was key, that we could provide for our psychological needs by
acquiring, destroying, rebuilding, cutting down, and bombing with ever
“smarter” technologies.
At this time, only the idea of the
archetype makes room for those three qualities, not as divided from each other
and at war, but as coming together in an understandable way. Hauke (2000) argued
that depth psychology can function today as
a response to modernity, and that it is presciently aligned with the postmodern
critiques of contemporary culture.
Soul Diagram
Figure 1
With the archetypal view, a physical or
somatic basis is necessary, but to limit understanding to only measurable
elements and outcomes is a materialistic fallacy. A spiritual view that takes
in the power of the divine – even unto prophecy – is necessary, but to limit it
to only the ways of the spirit of the
local culture and history is a control-based hubris that degrades the
individual soul’s very personal, sacred vocabulary. An emotional perspective is
vital, but when it limits its view to personalizing all feelings as mine and
generated by me, it constricts the full capacity of the human heart’s intuitive
capacity. The archetypal view is what we use to apprehend our students in the
most reverent and loving way.
C. G. Jung, first to bring the collective
unconscious or objective psyche and its archetypes to depth psychology, gave
many descriptions of them over the years. Jung (1970, Vol. 9) in The Archetypes
and The Collective Unconscious details the sources, the ways that we may
apprehend the archetypes, which are “complexes of experience that come upon us
like fate” and whose “effects are felt in our most personal life” (p. 30).
These are dreams, active imagination, the delusions of paranoiacs, fantasies
received in trance states, and the dreams of early childhood, ages 3 to 5. In
Symbols of Transformation, Jung (1970, Vol. 5) writes various descriptions of
archetypes: “The archetype is, as such, an unconscious psychic image, but it
has a reality independent of the attitude of the conscious mind” (p. 56); “It
is a psychic existent” (p. 56); “They are the universal and inherited patterns
which taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious” (p. 228),
and “The archetypes are the numinous, structural elements of the psyche and
possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables them to attract,
out of the conscious mind, those contents best suited to themselves” (p. 232).
Hillman (1975) saw archetypes as “the
deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the
perspectives we have of ourselves and the world” (p. xiii). He said that archetypes
are “axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories
about it ever return.” As such, archetypes resemble “the models or paradigms,
that we find in other fields . . . translations from one metaphor to another.”
All language, all definition is metaphorical, even in science and in logic.
Archetypes, however, possess us and blind us: “one thing is absolutely
essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their
bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance.”
Hillman even goes so far as to say “An archetype is best comparable to a God”
(p. xiii).
The archetypal principle is both ancient
and complex. However, in its application it is quite simple. When considering a
life, it is more appropriate to wonder what story or myth is being enacted.
What is this situation like? Is it like the story of Cain and Abel? Is this boy
like young Sir Gawain knocked completely out of his boat by the strong emotion
of the woman he loves? Is this girl like Grimm’s girl in Mother Holle, so sad that she falls down a deep well. It is the
image, the story that relieves the soul from isolation, which leads it out from
its cave of ignorance because now the person is not the only one. Jungians say
often that when the situation can be seen as a present-day playing out of an
eternal story, there is a curative effect. Our boy, then, may feel ashamed that
he fears the strong emotion of his girlfriend, but when he learns that one of
the knights who found the Grail had the same problems, he has a way through; in
fact, the trouble reveals hidden gold. Our girl may hate herself for her
depressions, but when she learns that the golden girl had the same problems,
she can begin looking for the wise old woman of nature at the bottom of her
well. The trouble has hidden gold; the story shows the way.
Connecting one’s behaviors and dreams to
ancient stories common to all cultures provides a way of “seeing through” to
the implications of the multiplicities with which we live our lives, the
patterns we enact of which we may not be aware. There is no end to the
archetypal persons, stories, and myths that appear. Western psychologists could
consider how a person may be enacting the archetype of Kore
and her birth, or the Puer Aeternus
learning from the Saturnal Senex
or the Apollonian warrior battling for divine truth, or the Dionysian ecstatic
lover, suffering and delighting in being dismembered by women, but all
cultures’ heroes, Gods, ancestors, dreams, visions, and stories can appear (Edinger, 1994).
Jung (1970, Vol.9) has detailed
descriptions of the Mother archetype, the Child archetype, the Wise Old Man and
Wise Old Woman archetypes, the Anima, the Animus, the Maiden, the
Trickster/Shadow archetype, the Wise Magician/Medicine Man archetype. Stevens
(1983) states that archetypes cannot be grasped academically, for they have a
feeling tone recognized by the individual experiencing the archetype:
“Ultimately, you cannot define an archetype, any more than you can define meaning.
You can only experience it” (p. 67). These aspects of the collective
unconscious appear to all, but especially to those who are receptive, who
notice symbols, who think in abstract ways, all of which are characteristics of
the gifted and talented. Application of the archetypal way is simply to put
students in touch with those stories, myths, books, persons, which seem to be
reflected in their lives. Teachers are encouraged to tell stories to answer
life questions. We often say, “Your situation reminds me of this story I once
heard.” This archetypal principle is central to the works of psychological
teachers like Robert Bly, Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, and Caroline Myss.
Their books on the wild man archetype (Bly, 1990),
the wild woman archetype (Pinkola-Estes, 1996), and
the archetype of spirit (Myss, 1999), all deepen and
bring understanding to everyday life by connecting it to myth.
The first author has applied depth
psychology’s deeper view in his high school French classes as a means to help
students understand historic art and architecture. As noted above, all
psychologies of depth regard the presence of the unconscious as a psychological
fact. (See Table 1 for suggested materials). (1) The Cro-Magnon caves of
initiation in the Dordogne,
|
Teaching High School
French Archetypally |
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Topic |
Required Materials |
Suggested Materials |
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|
|
Crossroads: the quest for contemporary
rites of passage. Lasalle, IL: Some, M.P. (1995). Of water and the
spirit: Ritual, magic and initiation in the life of an African shaman. Eliade, M. (1958). Rites and symbols of initiation. Spring. Campbell, J. (1988). Historical atlas of
world mythology vol 1: The way of the animal powers. Turner, V. (1987). Betwixt and between:
The liminal period in rites of passage. |
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|
Celtic Stone Images |
Davidson, H.R.E. (1995). Myths and
symbols in pagan early Scandinavian and Celtic religions. University Press. |
Celtic myths and legend: from Arthur and
the Round Table to the Gaelic gods and giants they battled.
(1999). New Page Books. Campbell, J. (1959). The hero with a
thousand faces. NJ.: Monick, E. (1995). Phallos: Sacred image
of the masculine. |
|||
|
Gothic Cathedrals |
Querido, R.M. (1987). The golden age of of a mystery school and the eternal
feminine. Press. |
Sardello, R. (1995). Love and the soul: Creating a future for earth. Artress, L. (1996). Walking a sacred path: Rediscovering the labyrinth as a spiritual tool. Matthews, C. (1991). Sophia goddess of
wisdom: The divine feminine from black goddess to world
soul. Matthews, C. Renaissance Reviving the academies of the
muses. In D. Fideler (Ed.), The journal of western cosmological
traditions. (pp.213- 226). Lawlor, R. (1997). Sacred geometry: Philosophy and practice. Hillman, J. (1975). Revisioning
psychology. and Row. Piirto, J. (1998). Understanding those who create (2nd Ed.). Reynolds, F. C. (2001). Creation: The
pyramid and the suns. |
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|
Surrealism |
Breton, A. (1952). Conversations: The autobiography
of surrealism. (Mark Polizzotti,
Trans.) |
Gablik, S. (1991). The reenchantment of
art. and Warlick, M. E. (2000). Max ernst and
alchemy: a magician in search of a myth. Jung, C.G. (1964). Man and his symbols
(Jaffe ed.). New York: HarperCollins. Literature thread La chanson de roland:
texte critique. Gautier, L. (1958) Tours: Amame
et fils Tristan et Iseult.
d’Angleterre, T. (1999). Nathan. Gargantua. (Texte
etabli et annote par Pierre Grind)
Rabelais, F. (1939). Paris:
Editions de Cluny. Les amours. de
Ronsard, P. (1963). Paris: Editions Garnier.Freres Essais de Montaigne.
Montaigne, M. (1872). Paris: Garnier Freres. Rousseau par lui-meme. May, G. (1961). Paris: Editions du Seuil. Candide. Voltaire, F. (1993). Cahiers: 1716-1755
Montesquieu, C. (1951). Paris: Grasset. Sardello, R. (1999). Freeing the soul from fear. Putnam. |
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Table 1 |
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(6) In the realm of literature, chansons such
as La Chanson de Roland, Tristan et Iseult; stories
like Gargantua of Rabelais; the poetry of Ronsard; the essays of Montaigne;
the books of Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Zola, Gide;
the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud; The
Little Prince by St. Exupery; all appeal to talented
high school students and demonstrate literature’s value to the soul. Sardello (1999) says this about literature: All literature
falls into four great movements of the soul–epic, tragic, comic, and lyric. All
sorts of mixtures of these soul patterns occur, but they are always variations
of these four worlds of the soul. In the epic, we are shown the heroic movement
of the soul; in tragedy, the fallen character of human beings; in comedy, the
world is redeemed; and in the lyric, we get a taste of the imagination of
paradise. (p. 233)
Little Prince who perceives with his heart,
and postmodern thinkers like Foucault and Lacan, who
see through games or metanarratives,
all make little sense without knowledge of the unconscious. We read and discuss
all of these in my high school French classes from French 1 to French 5.
The Capacity to
Understand Genius
The first author had a gifted student who suffered
from an extreme depression and who had to be hospitalized. She returned to
school heavily medicated and assigned to group rational-emotive therapy. This
is the typical educational response to psychological difficulties. The guiding
principle is that depression is an imbalance or sickness that blights
humanity’s natural upbeat outlook. Often, chemicals and interventions are
applied in order to make the pain go away, but what is underlying the pain is
not addressed. However, for the darker eye of depth psychologies, the
educational process can be seen through in its pathologizing
as well as in its sunnier guises. Seeing through the literal to the underlying
patterns, myths, and archetypes provides insight that is often telling. All the
names given to the quality of Genius over the years, indicate an “other,” who
is the protector of our reason for being. It is this Thorn, this Mad Spot,
which can be best understood when seen archetypally.
The word gift also means poison. Where the poison is, you will also find the
Genius. The student above tested for very high verbal ability; she wrote in a
style that was older than her age. On paper, she appeared as a student who
should breeze through school with good grades, which she did until puberty. She
went through a radical transformation that was accompanied by a powerful dream
of the end of the world. It was as if she was taken down the well by this
question: What constitutes the deepest meaning of this life? Where the Daimon/Genius/Thorn/Mad Spot intervenes is where education,
being led out, is being requested. Those who worked best with her honored the
pain of her question and worked with her to help her find her way through.
Those who made light of her suffering, pointing to underachievement, were bent
to remove the problem. They only found more trouble.
Her travels led her down under to
The Poetic Basis of Mind
Depth psychology is not science. It is
poetry (Hillman, 1975). Rooted in aesthetics and in imagination, everything is
interpreted as image, as story and as potentially meaningful. One doesn’t look
up a dream image in a dream book for the answers; one doesn’t read a dream as
literary criticism; rather, one seeks to go beyond the literal to the poetic,
beyond the psychoanalytic to the imagination in the image. Losing one’s teeth
in a dream is not a sexual image, as the dream manuals may say; rather, every
image, every story is interpreted with reference to the dreamer, the individual
having the dream. Every student has an individual dream – is an individual
dream – and has a vision. With a poetic basis of mind, the symbolic is
paramount. It takes precedence over the literal. Perhaps this is most aptly
illustrated in the ongoing discussion in our field about “giftedness” and
“talent development.” The discussion, as we see it, sets up straw men, for
talents are what must be “developed,” in order for the person to realize his or
her deepest giftedness.
The term “talent,” in American English,
refers to a mostly inborn skill, capacity, or propensity toward being able to
do something well. Developing “soul” in this context means following your bliss,
as Joseph Campbell (1968) so often said. While we are discussing the deepest,
most profound aspects of humanness, the talented person must have the will and
the passion for the demands of the talent domain. Part of being ensouled, or filled with soul, is to acquire expertise in
the place of passion. Talents are not to be developed blindly without inquiry
into the student’s passion. Depth psychology insists on including a student’s
heated interests. Depth psychology inquires where and why a talented student is
engaged in a certain domain, be it mathematics, a certain branch of science,
literature, music, sports, or other domain. Multitalented students are
encouraged to notice when they lose track of time, enter oceanic consciousness
(sometimes called flow), even when they get into trouble because of a
particular overexcitability. They are encouraged to
notice those areas where an incredible drive compels them to work in a domain.
That drive is like a Thorn, an Incurable Mad Spot, or Daimon.
None of these terms can be defined, except phenomenologically
– in symbol and in action; in metaphor or
in motion.
For example, the first author had a student
who scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT, who also performed
violin with the Cleveland Youth Orchestra. Her passion, however, was for
languages. She came to me after her third year of Spanish, wanting to learn
French. She advanced through to French 4 in two years. In Spanish, her teacher
created a level 6 to accommodate her talent. She went on to study languages at
the university, even though she could have achieved in the other domains.
Passion and drive made the difference. Depth psychology insists on that deeper
view of the student. The second author had an undergraduate honor student who
was going on to major in public administration in graduate school. She received
this letter from him:
Dear Dr. Piirto:
I am writing to you now in order to ask for
your help. I had contact with two of my relatives recently. Each approached me
individually and asked what I have planned for the future. I began to tell each
of them of my plans to get my master’s in public administration. I tried my
hardest to explain this career for them, but I felt like a fool. I explained
the different aspects and I tried to define it, but I stumbled and faltered. I
felt as if I were lying to their faces I am accepted into the
This young man at the age of 21 exhibits
the passion that we speak of. Depth psychology validates passion as the primal
necessity in living life. Another example comes from Robbin
Rogers, a teacher with her master’s degree in talent development education. She
is a high school English teacher, taking a seminar in depth psychology and
education.
Her weekly memo described a lesson in
teaching from the depths (See Appendix).
Words have life; they are alive. Images
have life; they are alive. Shifting and changing, enunciating and expanding,
the approach is qualitative, phenomenological, and even more (
wall between what the student prefers and
what the school expects (See Table 2).
In conclusion, the field of psychology
called depth psychology can open up an understanding, or at least an intuitive
perception, of giftedness that appreciates its mystery, its richness, and its
individuality. This paper has shown that attention to poetry, archetypes,
symbols, and depths can reach the inner truth, the souls of students and their
teachers.
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