Inner Journeys in the Outer World
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.
Epiphanies in Dark Light
I regard the images in this book as the silent voice of the Anima Mundi the whispering play of psychological life that now and then makes us pause at the wonder and beauty of the living world. Addressed by these epiphanies we come home to ourselves as responsive witnesses to these displays
In the Gap Between Psychology and Psychological Life
There is a gap between psychology as a profession and as a vocation. In 1962 I chose psychology as a profession. Ironically that choice was made in relation to a dream. It was ironic because the discipline that I chose was through the dream the discipline that chose me. Over the last 40 years psychology as a vocation has been leading me toward un-becoming the psychologist I had become.
In this gap between psychology as a profession and as a vocation, it is and has been the issue of language that has informed my work. What characterizes psychological language has been and still is for me the key question that has shaped my thinking, teaching and writing.
The word psychology means the logos or speaking of soul, and if what is in a name matters, then psychology defined as a STEM discipline whose language eschews the humanities in favor of the languages of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, invites us to question if it has been true to its name. In becoming a science that takes the measure of behavior has psychology lost soul?
Wandering in Wonder: On Becoming and Un-Becoming a Psychologist
A memoir that is an autobiography of a life and work as a psychologist told through the biography of the discipline of psychology, it is a story of alienation and homecoming in a technologically created world
Punctuations and Vignettes
Poetry, or at least some poetry, and stories are punctuations in the narratives of everyday life. They are moments of pause in the life sentences we live, pauses from periods as moments of full stops, to question marks (Think of Neruda), from commas and semi-colons to full colons, from parenthesis to dashes, which might display the splendor of the simple, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miracle in the mundane.
On the margins throughout this website are some new poems and vignettes that arose as such punctuations along the way
The Gifts of Aging
Finding the gifts of aging in friendship, in the solace of silence and the serenity in solitude, in learning how to travel light not just physically but also emotionally, in the pleasures of remembering and forgetting, in cultivating the imagination, in finding the capacity to let go of what was and what still one hopes will be in order to be receptive to what might be coming, are some of the themes presented in this meditation on growing old.
Notes of a Witness
This book is a meditation on 50 years as a psychotherapist. It looks at the lessons learned about suffering, hope, the meaning of health, the wisdom and value of dreams and the place of death learned on both sides of the couch as patient and therapist.