Borderlanders

Friday Lecture: Healing the Split between Psyche and Nature

Shortly before his death, Carl Jung wrote, “Through scientific understanding our world has become dehumanized...[Man’s] immediate communication with nature is gone for ever....”
Jerome S. Bernstein, Jungian Analyst, will discuss his theory that the Western psyche’s immediate communication with nature is not “gone for ever,” as Jung asserted, but is being reconnected to nature as an evolutionary compensation in the name of protection from species suicide. One by-product of this evolutionary process is what he calls Borderland consciousness. There are many people whose experience of reality is outside the mainstream of Western culture. Often they see themselves as abnormal because they have no articulated frame of reference for their experience. The concept of the Borderland personality explains much of their reality. With this new consciousness comes implications for how we define reality, for differentiating the pathological from the sacred, for clinical diagnosis and treatment, and for bridging the mind-body split. And it has implications for us all if, as Bernstein suggests, Borderland consciousness will be the prevalent consciousness by the end of the current century.
Although he came to discover the Borderland personality and Borderland consciousness in his clinical practice, increasingly its prevalence in the culture as a whole is becoming more evident. If Western civilization in its dissociation from nature poses a threat to our very survival, as Bernstein suggests, perhaps our salvation as a species rests on a different kind of understanding and on an evolving consciousness more reflective of the indigenous psyche than separate from it.