Shoulders Of Giants

This dissertation is all about Cosmic Play, the Cosmic Game, which is the eternally returning death-rebirth process of the universe, and thus the ideas in this dissertation have a long lineage. In writing my dissertation, I have been fortunate enought to stand directly on the shoulders of the following giants:

Sigmund Freud, founder of Psychoanalysis, for whom dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. Along the way however, Freud stopped to analyze different cultural creations, jokes, and slips of the tongue.

Carl Jung, founder of Analytic Psychology, who gave us the notions of archetypes and the collective unconscious in the first place, and who initially dealt with this death-rebirth pattern in the book Symbols of Transformation (1912/1956/1976; 1912/2001), which brought about Jung’s break with Freud. 

Otto Rank, a colleague of Freud's who explored the Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909/1970), explicated the importance of the Trauma of Birth (1924/1994), and examined Art and Artists (1929/1989), too. Rank was also the father of brief therapy.

Max Ernst, a surrealist artist, famous for his collages, who was influenced by Freud and who in turn influenced Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage.  Max Ernst’s work is featured in Jung's (1964) Man and His Symbols, the book that Jung conceived, contributed to and edited, which brought Jung's work to a more general audience, as this dissertation seeks to do, too. Ernst was a maverick and pioneered many different art forms.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, structural anthropologist who gave us the notion of bricolage to describe mythical thinking—the taking of a fixed set of things and rearranging and reassembling them into new and different things. Lévi-Strauss used the kaleidoscope as a prime example of bricolage.

Joseph Campbell, master mythologist, whose comparative studies illuminated the great monomyth The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1968), and whose passion and engaging style inspired millions to become interested in mythology. Joseph Campbell's work inspired me to attend Pacifica, the site of the Joseph Campbell archives [http://www.online.pacifica.edu/cgl/about].

Victor Turner, an anthropologist whose studies on the Ritual Process (1969) brought liminality to light, and whose explication of play's liminal nature has profoundly influenced my thinking; I find myself constantly returning to Turner's work. You could say that Turner has essentially been my White Rabbit.

James Hillman, founder of Archetypal Psychology, is a fellow bricoleur who inspired the many excursions in this dissertation, and who urged that depth psychology leave the confines of the consulting room.

Stanislav Grof, one of the fathers of Transpersonal Psychology, whose cartography of the psyche "makes it all make sense," and whose pioneering five decades research into nonordinary states of consciousness is of inestimable value. Dr. Grof was also my dissertation advisor.

Richard Tarnas explicated not only The Passion of the Western Mind (1993), but his work with Stanislav Grof over the years, especially in the field of astrology, has allowed me to see with archetypal eyes. Tarnas's (2006) epic work Cosmos and Psyche seeks to share this cosmic archetypal vision further.

And last but not least, the two visionary men and the “mouses” they created, without whom this dissertation would have been impossible:

Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, display, and a pioneer of the Internet, without whom we would not be able to be here today, pointing and clicking away. Dr. Engelbart's website Bootstrap.org contains fascinating information. [http://www.bootstrap.org/]

Walt Disney, inventor of the other Mouse, Mickey, gave us Disneyland and his masterpiece movie Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964), and his entertainment empire owned Miramax, which brought us Chicago (Marshall, 2002). Walt Disney's influence on my dissertation mirrors his influence in the culture at large. His creations have shaped our lives in innumerable ways.

Many others have made important contributions and information about them and their contributions can be found in the Dedication and Acknowledgments sections located in "Odds and Ends" section. Be sure to pay a visit there!

Preview of the Pattern

In case you want to get a preview of this cosmic pattern at play— let's take a sneak peak with an appropriate example using Disney's Alice In Wonderland (Geronimi & Jackson, 1951).  The terms referred to in parenthesis will be defined and become clear as we go along. They are included now, so that you can see that the different stages of Alice’s story can be characterized in different ways.

I: Alice begins dreamily sitting on the banks of the river, lost in a reverie (BPM I; Neptune)

II: Alice follows the white rabbit down the rabbit hole and is separated from the world she knows, everything is suddenly very different than before, and she is not very comfortable (BPM II; Saturn, Separation)

III: Alice ends up in Wonderland, and has many adventures there, which are very out of the ordinary. (BPM III; Pluto, Liminality)

IV: Alice returns from Wonderland, and sees things differently (BPM IV; Uranus, Reintegration)

Let’s get clicking . . . .

End of section, continue to Introduction

or skip on to Prelude: The Cosmic Setup