JUNGIAN ANALYST POSITS “EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS” IN NEW BOOK
For Immediate Release: December 1, 2005
Liz Williams, WMS Media
publicity@borderlanders.com
Jerome S. Bernstein, a Jungian analyst, has written a new book (Living in the Borderland / Routledge Press / $34.95 / November, 2005) which claims that just as we are evolving on a biological level, we are as well evolving psychologically. Chief among the many signs of this shift, being seen in therapist’s offices with increasing regularity, is what Bernstein has termed “Borderland consciousness.” People who are “borderlanders” regularly experience transrational realities – experiences that do not fit into a standard cause and effect logical structure, including, most significantly, a profound sensitively to nature, animals and the environment.
JEROME S. BERNSTEIN. Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma. ISBN 1583917578. Routledge, 2005.
In facing the crises of the twenty-first century, we need, more than ever, works such as Jerome Bernstein's remarkable and prophetic Living in the Borderland. This book enables us to believe in the possibility that our disastrous western culture can be healed. For Living in the Borderland is one of those rare texts that is so deeply immersed in a lifetime of clinical practice and research that it transcends boundaries between disciplines, between social groups and even between humans and nature. Bernstein demonstrates that the borderland, of consciousness, of cultures, of so-called 'sanity', of the margins cultivated between nature and human, is a place of potential redemption. In so doing, Living in the Borderland shifts the foundations of western epistemology in favour of restitution to native repressed cultures such as the Navajo. It fosters postcolonial justice, clinical revolution and the glorious possibility of saving the planet from the dominant group's predilection for species suicide.
BOOK REVIEW BY SUZANNE WAGNER, Ph.D.
Suzanne Wagner, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Sausalito, CA and a training analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She co-created the feature documentary, Matter of Heart, 1985 and is Director of The Remembering Jung Series: 28 hours of interviews with people who were close to Jung, forthcoming in DVD format.
This is a groundbreaking book for psychotherapists interested in the extension of Jung’s original findings on the dynamics of the ego and the collective unconscious. More broadly, it breaks ground for all people who are reflecting upon the destructive nature of the neurotic, one-sided Western ego. Jerome Bernstein is a man with a unique background of experience, reflection and action. With more than thirty years of experience as a Jungian analyst, he has worked directly with Navajo and Hopi medicine men exploring their healing traditions. He also has worked with the Navajo tribal council in their attempts to sustain healing rituals now in danger of being lost.
Living in the Borderland addresses the evolution of Western consciousness and describes the emergence of the 'Borderland,' a spectrum of reality that is beyond the rational yet is palpable to an increasing number of individuals.