Borderlanders

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.

To be more precise, Living in the Borderland does the following: addresses the roots of the catastrophic structuring of western consciousness upon the exploitative relation to nature gleaned from the Book of Genesis; its provides a lucid and convincing theoretical narrative by which to comprehend the connection between western severing of self from nature, and colonial conquest with the marginalization of those whose psyche resists the hegemonic styles of rational consciousness. The book also uses clinical case studies as practical ways of working with individuals that is at the same time a collective response to our global crisis. Moreover, Living in the Borderland is important because it shows a way of healing the violence of the cultural collisions forming modern America in bringing first peoples, here the Navajo, into a relationship to the arts of medicine in ways that values this 'other' epistemology without presuming to appropriate it.
Such a postcolonial weaving of Navajo approaches with the western marginalized practice of Jungian analysis and the dominant approaches to rationality, self and knowledge constitutes truly radical developments. From the skilful cultivation of heterogeneous points of view, Bernstein creates a framing story for his 'borderlanders'. These are those 'new people' who feel the suffering of the natural world inside them. They are not projecting. They are not regressing. Both ways of dismissing the reality of the experience of being psychically bonded to nature are representative of outmoded structures of modernity. In particular the subject/object split that Jung so struggled with and seemed to overcome with synchronicity (as Living in the Borderland shows), is revealed as obsolete and also the developmental model based upon a narrow, rationalistically singular view of the Oedipus complex.
The framing story of the borderlanders is one of redeeming modernity. Evolution developed in the west a highly specialized ego that has become fragile, deeply fearful of fragmentation and so enforcing a rejection of 'other' modes of being that it has incarnated that rejection in the means of mass destruction. Borderlanders are those who know their-selves as partaking in the suffering of the natural world. They are not pathological although could be driven so by the dominant culture's dismissal of their psychic reality as craziness. As clinical sections of the book argue, borderland experience is not the result of early trauma, as in accounted for by it. Rather Bernstein demonstrates that trauma may be a portal to the borderland, it is not a necessary one. In a nuanced and appreciative use of Donald Kalsched's The Living World of Trauma, Living in the Borderland persuasively extends Kalsched's thesis to encompass the radical notion of new evolutionary change. Borderlanders show the way to a viable future for all of us in a necessary modification to the western ego if species suicide is to be avoided.
So the framing story of the borderlanders is of people who have been taught to reject their sense of inner truth yet are actually the pioneers of a new saving consciousness. In a stunning use of chaos and complexity theory, Living in the Borderland joins this new story of being to the vital new research in science on holism and emergence. Complexity theory suggests that in nature, new forms of order emerge from the borderland of chaos and existing structures. Such complex interacting systems are more than the sum of their parts. The world picture thus engendered has no place for absolute subject/object distinctions. So humans cannot be excluded from complex interactions with nature. Consciousness may be said to operate as one of the 'complex adaptive systems' that make up the mutually evolving web of nature.
As well as taking clinical work deep into the new sciences, Living in the Borderland also revisits and re-positions Jung. The borderland thesis goes further than Jung was able to go explicitly in looking at the psyche and nature because sticking to the subject/object division of his time hampered him. However, borderland phenomena do occur in his work on synchronicity as Bernstein suggests. Moreover, Jung was fully aware that healing requires story or re-storying the relation of the individual to the collective. He too noted the similarities, and often superior success of indigenous cultures in making a narrative to nourish the whole psyche. So Living in the Borderland takes Jung's work into the twenty-first century with its wonderful braiding of Navajo healing with western analysis.
What is particularly fascinating to me in Living in the Borderland is its richness for multidisciplinary breakthroughs contained in the sustained comparison of Navajo and Jungian use of healing stories. As Bernstein makes abundantly clear, the Navajo live in a holistic world where religion, art and healing are one. Hence the role of chanting, sand painting and rehearsing the myths of origin in their medicine. Sickness is a breach in nature. It is an injury done to the cosmos and must be healed by making 'whole' (healing is to make 'whole') the creation in telling and re-telling the stories of cosmic and social being.
As Living in the Borderland points out, westerners are lost in the chaotic psyche without a story of origin to orient their consciousness of the self and the other. In fact, those defined as psychically 'ill', need first to structure their terrifying and painful symptoms into another kind of story; a trauma story that 'makes sense' (puts in a relationship to conscious being) those frightening feelings. This Jung knew and also argued in the context of his own time that more than a trauma story was required. Rather, sick westerners need to evolve or acquire their own 'origin stories' if true peace of mind was to be found. So Living in the Borderland shows, in its own structural working with different forms of knowledge in science, clinical practice, Navajo shamanism, history of evolution etc. the generating of a new origin story for twenty-first century salvation.
Such a powerful development of ways of working with story and healing is applicable in margins of western modernity that are not covered by this book. In literary research, I can see both notions of the borderland and of the healing drive from trauma story to origin story as major innovations in the understanding of narrative form. This is not surprising since Living in the Borderland is a book that takes apart that most redundant of western divisions of knowledge, that between the science and the arts. Making stories is here a matter of healing the sick, re-storying the relation to nature and saving humanity from its own estrangement from the other. It is science and art understood anew as another complex mutually adaptive system.
Finally, Living in the Borderland takes on the shadow of nature's suffering that extends a claw into us. Environmental Illness Complex refers to the illnesses of those who appear to be poisoned by the natural world. Bernstein suggests that they make real, realize, in their bodies and psyches (these not seen as separate) the contamination of nature by industrial poisons. What may present itself as people poisoned by hypersensitivity to chemicals in the environment is more truly the voicing of nature's pain. Those suffering EIC are in fact entering the borderland via the trauma portal; this time the trauma is initiated by chemical pollution.
Living in the Borderland is important because it offers hope. Its profoundly imaginative and radical blending of science, Jungian analysis, history of ideas, Navajo culture and creativity, demonstrates what is possible in facing the global crisis of humanity and nature in our time. The book provides many opportunities for those working in the fields of analysis, cultural studies, science, history and the arts. Living in the Borderland provides the epistemological ground upon which we can both think change and live it. This borderland is one we know, but we did not know we knew it, until this book. What a tribute to this major contribution to tackling the most dangerous problems in the world!
I cannot wait for Jerome Bernstein's next book!