Event Description:

Reflections from an Australian consulting room on the interrelations between experiences of space, place, identity and God.

Indigenous writer and activist Alexis Wright, in her recent paper On Writing Carpentaria, said this:
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”

Wright also speaks of Australia as “the land of disappearing memory” just as W.E.H.Stanner before her spoke of a “cult of forgetfulness”. In a paper delivered to the Jung Society in February of last year I laid out something of the psychological terrain of trauma that collapses imaginative space and hence contributes to this experience of ‘loss of history’ and loss of psychohistorical memory and hence mind.

In this talk the themes of displacement, unsettledness, alienation, belonging, emplacement, the uncanny, identity, fear of the unknown and the unknown Other, are deepened into an exploration of the Backgrounds of Beauty – both awesome and terrible - that underpin our individual and hence collective capacities to love and to dwell both in body and in place. I would argue that such subtle geography informs our relationships with this place in which we live.

Drawing on the stories and experiences of individual patients and the writings of Wright (especially her novel Carpentaria), the American philosopher of place Edward Casey, David Abrams, Craig San Roque, Deborah Bird-Rose, Donald Meltzer, Winnicott, Bion and Jung we will follow a line of thinking that asks “Where do thoughts come from? Can we think of country as mind?” And how does this help us to come to terms with the presence of the Other mind and spiritual system resident here and the realities of what colonisation has done.

Biography:

Amanda Dowd is a Jungian Analyst and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Sydney. She trained with the Australian New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts and has been practising for 15 years. She has a special interest in the mythopoetics of relationship, and the formation of self, mind, identity and cultural identity.

Clarification for 'Backgrounds of Beauty':
Amanda Dowd wishes it to be known that while she will be referring to Alexis Wrights novel Carpentaria, along with other texts, in her talk ‘Backgrounds of Beauty’, neither Ms Wright nor Carpentaria are the subjects of her talk. The Jung Society apologises for any confusion caused.

The Jung Society also wishes to acknowledge the snake design on the cover of Carpentaria reproduced on page 27 in Jung Downunder is the work of Murandoo Yanner.

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