It's not about me

but here are some of my teachers 

Ted Good, Professor of Hebrew Bible, my advisor at Stanford, and my best friend’s father. He wrote Irony in the Old Testament, taught me to read the Bible as literature, and how much fun it is to laugh with someone so eriudite, especially at dinner-time.

George Hogle 

This picture was taken shortly before his death. 

I was introduced to George by his daughter, with whom I grieved the death of my brother, her boyfriend.  We both had dreams about him and when I finally got to ask her dad about them, he advised me to take them seriously, and if I wanted to go into this line of work, I should study religion rather than medicine.  I reminded him of this pivotal advice when he turned 100, shortly before his death.

Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Member Chief of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs , follower of Handsome Lake.  From Oren Lyons I learned about the Peacemaker and the Code of Handsome Lake.

Ernest Wallwork

I lived with and worked for Ernest while at Syracuse University.  I assisted his classes on Psychology and Religion and he taught me about medical ethics, Durkheim, and classical psycholoanalysis, and introduced me to Heinz Kohut and empathy, about which I wrote my dissertation.

Verena Kast, my training analyst at the Jung Institute.  During my training, I translated four of her books into English.  

Here are some lines I wrote for the forward of Folktales as Therapy.

Kast’s popularity has been held against her. How can anything be profound that is popular? And yet Jungian psychology itself provides the answer to this apparent riddle: If archetypal images express dilemmas that are common to most if not all of humanity, and if folktales are an expressive medium through which these images are entertainingly passed along, then it should come as no surprise that a therapist who writes a great deal about folktales would see a great many books, provided she can write in a way that does not bore her audience.

Of course not everyone can write about folktales without boring their audiences. To my mind, one of Kast’s unique gifts is her ability to spring deftly from folktale to therapy and back again. Sometimes one hardly notices the transition because her parallels are anything but contrived. We do not read about dreams reproducing secret chapters form the history of the human spirit; we hear how a folktale image motivate a client to change…

There are those who would object to Kast’s optimistic reading of psychology through the lens of folktales; it reminds them of some “happy ending” Gospel. What does this gospel have to do with Jung’s vision of a wrenching clash of opposites that never finds an end but only winds its way towards new heights of tragic conflict, they ask. Is Kast suggesting that problems can actually be solved, that folktales can provide us with maps for finding our way thorough emotions to maturity, as the title suggests? 

Kast’s “belief,” however outlandish or optimistic, is nevertheless critical and psychological, namely, that relationships become diseased, stunted in their growth, packed full of unrealistic expectations, and that it is the job of the psychologist schooled in folklore to unravel the eerie images that implicate themselves in such relationships.

Therapists, like folktales, may seem to preach simplistic convictions, like the benefit of following one’s dreams, as in “The Nixie in the Pond,” or the rewards of being patient, as in “The Goose Maid.” If we adopt a folkloric, therapeutic view of life, don’t we run the risk of ruining our lives by pinning our hopes on rhetorically persuasive illusions?

Yet to unravel their seductive power over the soul, as Joringel does when he frees Jorinda from her entrapment as a nightingale, it is not enough to decry the seductive allure of images. One must know the ways of this “witch” very intimately. Kast can be of great assistance in this task. Although Joringel’s fate and official task was to tend sheep, his secret pastime was a study of the witch that held his love captive. Then one day he was bold enough to crash the gates of his romantic desire and recover a real woman from the trap of his happily-ever-after symbiosis. Through Kast’s interpretations, the poison of images and illusions—indeed of “fairytales”—becomes its own antidote.

Mario Jacoby

When I arrived in Zürich, I called Dr. Jacoby to ask him if he would be my training analyst.  He didn’t have enough time.  Later he asked me to translate one of his books into English and we became good friends. 

I am especially proud of this diploma