In this week’s episode author and Jungian psychotherapist Steven Herrmann speaks with Joanna about: William Everson and the poet as a medicine person; Walt Whitman and being in love with the Earth; an arch of spiritual freedom, from William James to the sixties; the human shadow and the destruction of the environment; the influence of Native American spirituality in the founding of American democracy; the competing myths in the collective American psyche; Herman Melville, “Moby Dick” and the foreseeing of same sex marriage; the early American poets and the liberation of Eros; the vocational dreams from Nature; practices for spiritual democracy.

Recognized internationally, author and Jungian psychotherapist Steven Herrmann has published over forty papers, several chapters, and four books, “William Everson: The Shaman’s Call”, “Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul”, “Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward” and “Emily Dickinson: A Medicine Woman for Our Times”. He has taught on the subjects of Jung, Whitman, and Melville at the C. G. Jung Institutes of San Francisco, Chicago, and Zurich, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and on Jung and James at Yale University. Herrmann’s expertise in jungian Literary Criticism makes him one of the seminal thinkers in the international field, and a foremost authority on Whitman, Melville, and now Dickinson in post-Jungian studies.

“I Can’t Sit Still”, original music by Evarusnik

Episode Navigator