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Robert Romanyshyn

Educator, Author and Psychotherapist 


 


 

Inner Journeys in the Outer World

The DVD awakens the bond between the living soul of nature and us

You can purchase it here.
 

Excerpt of a lecture based on the DVD

In this Jung Platform lecture excerpt, Robert explores the intertwining of psyche and nature in the context of the ecological crisis of the melting polar ice.

 

NEW POLICY ON ORDERING MY BOOKS

Please do not order any of my books directly from me using Pay Pal as I
do not have copies of them in my library. All are available on
Amazon and/or other book sites, and three specific titles—The
Wounded Researcher, Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the
Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies, and
Technology as Symptom and Dream--can be ordered from my
publisher, Routledge.

 


 

Go to Robert's Amazon page to see and order all of his books.

 


 

Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies

Re-telling Mary Shelley’s story from the point of the Monster he created and abandoned, this book explores eight ways in which her story has prophetic implications for our time. This book raises the fundamental question of ‘Who is the Monster?,’ and it also suggests that her story is also a love story when love is not corrupted by power.
 

Testimonials

This long awaited book from Robert Romanyshyn on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein draws deeply on the story of the Creature who longs for relationship with his creator who sees him only as a devil, unworthy of even a name.  Romanyshyn weaves a tender teaching around eight questions when Victor’s Monster, who haunts the margins of his maker’s work, summons us out of the light. His work is an invitation to listen in the frailty of darkness and he shows us how attending to the Monster might transform us sufficiently to give hospitality to what has been exiled and silenced, for want of a name. He not only attends to the untold tale told by the Monster, which carries the prophetic shadow of his maker’s dream to become a new god of creation, he also uncovers seeds of hope that are buried in Mary Shelley’s story. It is a beautiful book so responsive to many of the crises we face today and I warmly welcome it. 
 

Mary Smail HCPC, UKCP Founder of SoulWorks UK -- telling the untold story

In this important, innovative and imaginative work, Robert Romanyshyn dreams the dream of Mary Shelly’s classic novel Frankenstein onward and serves as a doctor for Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous shadow, the shadow of our unconscious technological civilization. With a phenomenological, poetic and Jungian archetypal sensibility, Romanyshyn raises fundamental questions, which unveil the hubris and unbridled inflations that have led to disastrous consequences for our time. Looking directly into the darkest recesses of our personal and cultural depths, he courageously calls us to a new vision and to an ethical and aesthetic renewal of our relationship to nature and the divine.
 

Stan Marlan, Ph.D., ABPP, Author of The Black Sun: Alchemy and the Art of Darkness.

In a brilliant and profound analysis of Mary Shelley’s book, Robert Romanyshyn raises the crucial moral question of where the seemingly insane pace of our technological powers to dominate nature is taking us, while ethical concerns of our responsibility to life and to nature are increasingly side-lined and ignored.  He contrasts the utilitarian ‘spectator-mind’ of Victor Frankenstein with the aesthetic sensibilities of the Monster he has created who awakens to the beauty and marvel of nature with wonder and awe, thereby drawing the comparison between the detached ‘objective’ approach of the scientist and the aesthetic sensibility of the poet's sense of relationship with the life around him. He raises the immensely important question of whether, in having the power to do something with our technological mastery, we should proceed to do it. He asks us to awaken from our current Frankensteinian dream of dominating nature and exploiting her resources for our own ends in time to prevent us destroying the unique and beautiful planet we inhabit.


Anne Baring Ph.D. , Jungian Analyst and author of The Dream of the Cosmos: a Quest for the Soul.

Professor Romanyshyn has brought to bear his unique blend of scholarship and creative reverie on this novel by Mary Shelley. First discussed in an earlier book thirty years ago, that early meditation on Shelley’s Frankenstein has matured and born fruit. This wonderful collection of related essays are a culmination of decades of genuine thinking by one of psychology’s most renowned writers. It is, of course, ultimately a book about us, mirrored in that two hundred year old dream.


Roger Brooke, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Duquesne University

As a young woman, Mary Shelley wrote a story that has universal appeal and mythic power. Robert Romanyshyn helps us apply that powerful vision in our day by offering penetrating questions and a broad scope. I found the writing beautiful and the analysis eye-opening. With help from this enlightening book, Frankenstein still speaks to you and me with humanistic hope.”  


 Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

C. G. Jung argued that visionary works of art are prophetic, a notion that literary studies also generated in its own way. Although this is a uniquely multidisciplinary work of Jungian arts-based research, Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies by Robert Romanyshyn contributes to rapidly expanding debates in psychology, ecology, philosophy and literary studies. As a radical, intimate, poetic critique of a canonical novel that is central to literary degrees, this book is critical for reading Shelley’s novel as prophetic of climate change, of the crisis in psyche and technology, as anticipating philosophies of the nonhuman, and, above all in this anxiety-ridden 21st century, for finding hope!
 

Susan Rowland (PhD) Author of Remembering Dionysus (2017).

 

In today's world, science is offering us an array of utopian visions of humanity that is able to survive without human bodies, to replace plant and animal food sources with genetically modified versions, to design perfect babies, and to colonize space. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, created two centuries ago, struggled with similar questions in regard to the role of technology,ethics, and relationships. Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies invites us into a dialogue about these important questions in regard to the contemporary world through evoking not only our historical and social awareness but our own imagination and our very human longings to conquer ourselves and our world, and by doing that to create and to face the Monster(s). 

 

 

  

 



 

 Leaning Toward the Poet

This book is part of an ongoing experiment to develop a poetic sensibility for a psychology rooted in the spirit of the depths in response to the spirit of the times in psychology, which would define the discipline in terms of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Accompanied in places by images, the poems in this small volume celebrate the splendor of the simple, attest to the miracle in the mundane, and explore both the shadows and the stray lines of experience that undo our map making minds. They are gifts I have gathered along the way while traveling in the company of the poets.

 

From the Book


Meeting Patrick Kavanagh in Dublin

Along a walkway near the Liffey River in Dublin, Ireland
is a bench where the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh use to sit.
I discovered one day that he still sits there,
even though he died many years ago.

‘Trying to be a poet,’ he told me, ‘is a peculiar business.’
‘What does it feel like,’ I asked, ‘to be a poet?’
But then a breeze rustled the leaves in the tree
and he was gone, leaving me with that question.

I have wondered about this business of being a poet for a long time.
I do not think of myself as a poet even though I do write some poems.
And I do read the poets, almost everyday, a kind of ritual practice.
But the word itself—poet—, it seems to me, is a benediction bestowed by others.
One does not bless oneself in this way.
Orpheus, I think, would be offended.
 

The tribe of the poets is a small one.
To join it, even if only to tag along at the very far end of their wanderings,
like some beggar picking up the crumbs of the feast left by those who are poets,
feels uncomfortable and even dangerous.
Prose feels more comfortable
and I feel more at home in the well fashioned costumes of my prosaic self.

But sometimes I dream
I am following along at the end of that procession,
wearing a patchwork garment made by a rag picker from the odds and ends of life.
And the dream always ends on that bench beside the Liffey River in Dublin
as I watch Patrick Kavanagh sew patches on the sleeves of torn coats.

 

Always a gap appears between a life event and its trailing expression. Lingering on one or the other side of the gap--gaping in wonder at what calls to be filled and fulfilled, Romanyshyn’s book fills that gap with the beauty of its images that are at once haunted by the future even as they rest serene in past light. Written by a psychologist, Leaning Toward the Poet presents overtures to soul celebrating the ordinary. 
 

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D. is the author of Twisted Sky: Selected Poems and Feathered Ladder: Selected Poems of Dennis Patrick Slattery and Brian Landis 

 

In his first book Psychological Life: From Science to Metaphor we as readers were invited to participate in “the recovery of psychological life as a metaphoric reality.”  Here in Leaning Toward the Poet Romanyshyn now extends that invitation again. This time, however, it is not through the application of any theory, or academic discourse; but, rather, through metaphor itself. In these pages one finds the poetic exploration of the wonder behind the ordinary, the phenomena of Provence mornings and evening light, as well as the “darkening plane (where) the dead are weeping” all brought to elegant life in this author’s on-going response to, and recovery of, soul. 
 

Brian Michael Tracy is the author of three books of poems: Driving with Dante, Opaque Traveller, and The Distance Between Shores. 

$13.95  Special $12.00

  

The Wounded Researcher:Research with Soul in Mind (2007)

"Soul work and academic research have been so split apart that both have been lamed-soul psychology without intellectual respectability and scholarly research utterly irrelevant to the soul's concerns. Romanyshyn's book not only follows from all his earlier diligent explorations in the Western history of soul, but also charts a course that joins the integrity of scholarly work with devotion to the soul's vital needs. New winds, new directions, new methods." (James Hillman)

 

 

 

 

$38.95


 

 

Ways of thHeart: Essays toward an Imaginal Psychology (2002)

"There is much to praise in this book, this truly extraordinary writing…Each of the essays of this  book explores the intricacies of the currents of the heart, developing the vocabulary for soul's own voice rather than the speaking for soul that characterizes most psychology…The fundamental tenant of this book is that we are here to learn to listen…In order to get the meaning of this book, to really get it…the reader is asked to feel the words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, in a bodily way, as if you are engaged in a beautifully choreographed dance. Let yourself dance with this book and then you will get it."

(Robert Sardello)

 "Every time I read the work of Robert Romanyshyn I am touched by his honesty, imagination, originality and depth of vision. His psychological insight and poetic sensibility resonate with the force and profundity of a man who lives a full and soulful life."

(Stanton Marlan)

$14.95


 

Mirror and Metaphor: Images and Stories of Psychological Life (2001)

‘This brilliant and lucid book, now available in the second edition, takes us into genuinely new territory. It revises our ideas of psychology and science, and it offers original thoughts on metaphor. It is a text which anyone seriously interested in the broader reaches of psychology should read, and from which every reader will profit.”

Edward S. Casey

 

 

 

 
$23.95  Special $19.95


 

  

The Soul in Grief: Love Death and Transformation (1999)

This book has been praised as a simple, elegant and poetic memoir of the mourning process that takes the reader deeply into the heart of love and loss and that beautifully describes that process in terms that mirror the seasons of nature. In his Foreword to the book, Thomas Moore has described it as "…a new way of imagination…a form of education of the deepest sort…a book where the soul will feel completely at home." An emotionally candid account of his wife's sudden and unexpected death, this is a book not only about grief as the possibility of homecoming, it is also a book about the enduring and transforming capacities of love.

$11.55

  

Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989)

This book, which has been reprinted four times since its publication, is a cultural-historical exploration of the origins of the technological attitude that has shaped the contemporary world. Relying on the work of J.H. van den Berg, it shows how the invention of linear perspective art in the 15th century has become a cultural habit of mind. Within this shared collective dream, the self behind a window becomes a spectator who, with its eye upon the world, takes leave of the body's sensuous ties to the world, which opens the path toward the body becoming a specimen for the anatomical gaze and for the world becoming a spectacle to be mapped and measured. Approached as a collective symptom, the book is a work against forgetting, a work of returning to origins to recover technology as a cultural and historical achievement that allows us to appreciate its values and its limits. In this regard, the book is an example of how phenomenology can be the practice of a cultural therapeutics.

$43.18  Special $38.00

 

Psychological Life: From Science to Metaphor

 

Translated into Japanese in 1984, this book is an application of the phenomenological approach to psychology that draws on the work of J.H van den Berg and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

From the Review in Dreamflesh: A Journal of Ecological Crises and Archaelologies

Romanyshyn, like Wolfgang Giegerich, is another post-Jungian psychologist working in similar areas to James Hillman. In some ways he’s a poetically-minded rival to Giegerich’s hyper-cerebral insistence on logic. But Romanyshyn is far from lacking rigour, applying it – via his background in phenomenology – to the lived experience of the body. This book is a brilliant hidden history of science, mining developments such as linear perspective drawing, the Copernican Revolution, and modern anatomy in order to extract and refine a poetic narrative underlying our progressive estrangement from nature. Essential.

 
 
 
 
$12.45