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Psychological Perspectives: AQuarterly Journal of JungianThoughtPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/upyp20

A Review of “Living in theBorderland: The Evolutionof Consciousness and theChallenge of Healing Trauma”Naomi Ruth LowinskyPublished online: 11 Mar 2011.

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Psychological Perspectives, 54: 107–113, 2011Copyright c© C. G. Jung Institute of Los AngelesISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00332925.2011.547140

Book Reviews

LIVING IN THE BORDERLAND:THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

AND THE CHALLENGE OF HEALING

TRAUMA. (2005). BY JEROME

BERNSTEIN. NEW YORK:ROUTLEDGE.

Reviewed by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

“When despair for the world grows inme. . .

I go and lie down where the woodeddrakerests in his beauty on the water, andthe great heron feeds.”

—Wendell Berry

I f you’ve been grieving the brownpelicans, their feathers fouled

by oil, their eggs endangered bythe gathering crude in the Gulf ofMexico, you may be suffering fromthe “Great Grief” Jerome Bernsteindescribes in this essential book forour times. If you are haunted bysick sea turtles, by the oil slickthreatening those delicate marsh-lands in Louisiana, by pregnant dol-phins who can’t find clear waters togive birth to their young, you are

likely a member of a clan Bernsteinidentifies as “Borderlanders.”

I am. Like others of our tribe,I am in the grip of mountains,rivers speak to me, trees know myname. I’ve heard trees scream whenthey’re cut down. As Bernstein ex-plains it: “The collective uncon-scious has tapped certain individu-als within the culture to be carriersof personal and collective mourn-ing for the profound assault andwounds to nature wrought, predom-inately, by Western civilization andthe modern technological society”(p. 79).

If you pick up vibrations, see en-ergy flow, have intense transper-sonal, irrational experiences, worryabout watersheds and wolves, are“too sensitive,” have been patholo-gized by family or professionals, youwill find yourself understood andappreciated in Bernstein’s eloquentand overarching theory—perhapsyou’ll have a new sense of how youfit in—I did. Bernstein writes:

The Borderland is a phenomenon ofthe collective unconscious. It is anevolutionary dynamic that is mov-ing the Western psyche to recon-nect our overspecialized ego to itsnatural psychic roots. Indeed, it ispossible that our very survival asspecies Homo sapiens may dependon this shift that is taking place.The people I have dubbed Border-land personalities experience and

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incarnate these new psychic formsinto their lives. . . . (p. 9)

This is not news in Jungian cir-cles. Jung, after all, always warnedabout the one-sidedness of West-ern culture, and wrote of the“Promethean debt which has to bepaid off . . . in the form of hideouscatastrophes” (Vol. 9.1, par. 276).But Bernstein has furthered andbroadened Jung’s work and made itspeak eloquently to our own catas-trophic times.

Bernstein creates an elegantstructure to hold his many-facetedtheory. The Western ego, with itsemphasis on rationality and on thedominion by humans of the naturalworld, has been with us since Gen-esis. This is a different sort of ego,Bernstein argues, than the earlier—merged with nature—ego (p. 21).Much has been gained by this devel-opment, of course—science, medi-cine, engineering, mathematics—the self-consciousness made possi-ble by an ego that is separate fromnature (p. 27). But our losses havebeen great—oral culture, magic, an-cient ways of healing, the direct ex-perience of divinity and of the an-

ima mundi.Bernstein leans heavily on Dar-

win, and much of his thinking isevolutionary. But he says, Darwin“did not anticipate. . .that when theWestern ego displaced God and as-sumed those powers previously at-tributed to God, the resulting hubriswould bring us to the edge of extinc-tion” (p. 43).

Bernstein borrows building ma-terials from many fields of knowl-edge to create a bridge that cancarry his reader from our presentmoment of crisis into the possibilityof transformation. These buildingmaterials include Jungian and main-stream psychology, trauma work,chaos and complexity theory, cul-tural anthropology, ecology, evolu-tion, biblical studies, internationalrelations, Native American teach-ings, environmental illness, and hisown clinical practice. We are all inthe grip of a hubristic power com-plex (p. 52), and our survival so farhas more to do, he argues, with “cre-ative reordering phases at the edgeof chaos” (p. 54) than with what ourinflated Western ego thinks we’redoing.

Bernstein is an interesting char-acter in his own book, which is oneof the ways he makes it compellingreading. He is not only a wide-ranging scholar, a rational and sci-entific mind trying to sort throughthe vexing issues of our time—he isa pilgrim on life’s path, one who hasoften gotten lost, frightened, andconfused, a “fat little Jewish boyfrom southeast Washington D.C.”(p. 5) amazed to find himself “im-mersed in Hopi and Navajo religionand healing.” He writes with grati-tude for his Native American teach-ers, his Jungian analysis, and withrefreshing humility about being ini-tiated into the mysteries of the Bor-derlands by his patients, especiallyone he calls Hannah.

Hannah spoke to him of her feel-ing for animals—cows on the way

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REVIEWS � 109

to slaughter, stray dogs. He won-dered what aspects of herself shewas projecting on the animals. Overtime she became so frustrated withhis inability to hear that she wasspeaking about the animals—notherself—that she took her shoe inher hand and banged the floor withit. This cracked open Bernstein’sclinical approach. He writes:

As I listed to Hannah struggle to ar-ticulate her emotions I did “get it.”It was indeed the cows. I realizedthat what Hannah was telling me wasprecisely the same message the na-tive elders and healers were teachingme—and what my own unconsciouswas telling me through my dreams.Everything animate and inanimatehas within it a spirit dimension andcommunicates in that dimension tothose who can listen. (p. 8)

The image of Hannah bangingher shoe on the floor has stayed withme, as I sit with my own patients,and with myself. It has the qualityof a Zen slap to our technologicallybesotted culture. Bernstein writesmovingly of how wounding it can beto the Borderland type to be pathol-ogized. I remember how huge a riskit was to share my numinous expe-riences with my analyst when I firstentered treatment, my fear of beingseen as “crazy,” my own judgmentthat I must be crazy—how grateful Iwas to be simply heard.

Bernstein’s life path took him tothe Navajo reservation in the 1970s,because he was working with thefederal Office of Economic Oppor-

tunity. This led him to an ongoingrelationship with Hopi and Navajocultures, and a friendship of manyyears with the Navajo medicine manJohnson Dennison. These experi-ences cracked open his world view.He learned that the Navaho see theworld as alive, in contrast to our sci-entific objectification of the naturalworld—which deadens things.

The Navajo understand illnessto be a disturbance in the bal-ance between a person and na-ture. Bernstein says: “Thus Navajoceremonials focus much energy onre-establishing harmony and aware-ness of the beauty of life and ulti-mately the beauty of the individuallife of the one who is sick” (p. 130).He will sometimes consult with Den-nison on a case and suggest to apatient that he or she go througha healing ceremony. Dennison be-lieves that “balancing the individual,heals the world” (p. 140).

Bernstein believes, as do so manyof us, that our civilization is wildlyout of balance and that we collec-tively require healing. This ambi-tious and challenging book speakseloquently to the trouble we’rein, yet offers us hope. Bernsteinends the book—his epilogue—witha healing story about the “People ofthe Word,” who were very smart andinvented marvelous machines. Butthey had forgotten the rituals andceremonies that once connectedthem to earth wisdom and to thedivine. They became obsessed withgreed and killing. Meanwhile the“Rainbow People tilled their land,

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110 PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES � VOLUME 54, ISSUE 1 / 2011

hunted for their food, performedtheir rituals and ceremonies, toldstories in the dark winter nights andWalked in Beauty” (p. 230). “Theydid not understand . . . [a] god [who]cared only about words and nothingabout the plants and trees and an-imals” (p. 233). We all know whathappened next: the Great Sicknessand the Time-of-Great-Sadness, theTrail of Tears, the loss of lands,languages, rituals, and Holy People.Meanwhile the People of the Wordfought two Great Wars and cre-ated a terrible new weapon of war(p. 237). But, as Bernstein tells it,something shifted, some new “Terri-ble Awareness” (p. 237) by the Peo-ple of the Word. “At last a few of thePeople of the Word were beginningto discover the wisdom of the Waysof the Rainbow People” (p. 238).

By the end of this story, which isthe end of the book, and the end ofa compelling and complex pilgrim-age through many fields of study,we two peoples are looking at eachother over the Borderlands that di-vide us. Some of us have venturedinto those liminal lands. Bernsteinis a guide into this new chaotic ter-ritory. He gives us courage for theimpossible path ahead, deep em-pathy for our personal and collec-tive trauma, and a passion for “TheBeauty Way,” which the Navajo un-derstand as the path that honors thefullness and sacredness of all life(p. 129).

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is a Jungian

analyst in Berkeley, CA. A widely

published poet, she won the Obama

Millennium Award, and her poetic

memoir, The Sister from Below: Whenthe Muse Gets Her Way, was published

by Fisher King Press. She is poetry

and fiction editor of Psychological Per-spectives.

ON BEHALF OF THE MYSTICAL

FOOL: JUNG ON THE RELIGIOUS

SITUATION. (2010). BY JOHN P.DOURLEY. LONDON & NEW YORK:ROUTLEDGE.

Reviewed by J. Marvin Spiegelman

I n the almost half-century sinceJung’s death, his followers

have gone from like-minded groups(e.g., classical, archetypal, develop-mental) to individuals with highlydiverse viewpoints, ranging fromGiegerich (who thinks that Jungshould have given up looking forhis myth) to our current author—Catholic priest, professor, theolo-gian, writer, and Jungian analyst—who wants to use Jungianthought to simply get beyondall monotheisms and locate God (orgods) exclusively in the psyche.He rightly berates all “superces-sionism,” particularly in his ownCatholic Church, and convincinglydemonstrates, using six and a halfpages of detailed references toJung’s work, that all the images ofthe divine originate in the psyche.In order to preclude all the murderand violence of the monotheisms,with their “One and Only Gods,”Dourley states that the divine

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