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PATRICIA BERRY
Patricia Berry has been active in the Jungian world for nearly half a century, serving on faculties and boards of training institutions, and as President of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, as well as of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts. She teaches and lectures internationally and lives and practices in Carpinteria, CA.
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JUNG’S EARLY PSYCHIATRIC WRITING
The Emergence of a Psychopoetics
First edition 2023
Paperback original, 174 pages, $20
ISBN: 978-0-88214-139-8
Kindle/Apple Books, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-133-6
Jung’s early psychiatric writing shows the basis for a psychopoetics, i.e., a psychology founded explicitly on the making activities of the human mind. In Jung, however, this basis is obscured by an ambivalence in regard to the aesthetic. Berry considers this ambivalence by focusing on an event in Jung’s personal life. During his period of breakdown and disorientation, Jung encounters an imaginary figure who tells him the work he is engaged in is art. Jung rejects this figure he calls “the aesthetic lady,” maintaining that his concern is not art but nature. This dichotomy of art versus nature, imagination versus natural science, is paradigmatic throughout Jung’s work.
   Subsequent chapters examine Jung’s psychiatric case studies to show the interweaving of the scientific and the aesthetic, and to distinguish from this interweaving features fundamental for Jung’s psychopoetic attitude. The characteristics of this attitude include techniques of likening, contrast, tension, a countering of the more literal with the less, and assumptions of thematic constancy, what Jung is later to call the primordial image, or archetype.
 
Echo’s Subtle Body
ECHO’S SUBTLE BODY
Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology
Third, revised edition 2017
Paperback original, 192 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-062-9
Kindle/Apple Books, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-076-6
A collection of Patricia Berry’s writings published between 1972 and 1982, which together develop a style of psychotherapy that is based on the primacy of the image in psychical life. The book contains the often referred to but out-of-print essays “An Approach to the Dream” and “What’s the Matter with Mother?” as well as newer papers. The style poetically concrete, the insights bolstered by clinical example, dream interpretation, and mythical references, each paper revisions an important analytic construct—reductions, dream, defense, telos or goal, reflection, shadow—so that it more adequately and sensitively echoes the poetic basis of the mind. One of the best available introductions to the fresh ideas now enlivening the practice of Jungian analysis. Of special interest to psychotherapists and to all concerned with myth, dream, and feminine studies. In addition, this new and revised edition includes “Rules of Thumb Toward an Archetypal Psychology Practice,” a text written in honor of James Hillman in 2008.