Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D., is Distinguished Emeritus Professor in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. He has taught there for the last 26 of his 52 years in the classroom. He offers riting retreats and workshops in the United States and Europe on exploring one’s personal myth through the works of Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung’s Red Book.

 

 

Dennis Slattery  00:07

then the question came up, can I trust laws can laws mentor us, when we experienced a loss of a friendship of a person of a, of a part of our life that we realize, you know, that’s gone. I thought I could hang on to it, I thought it was going to be permanent. And I see that it’s dissolved, or it’s in the process of dissolving, trusting in a loss can be seen as creating a vacuum in us. But it also can be understood as giving us an opening that we never had before.

Clay Boykin  00:54

Hello, my name is Clay Boykin, and I’m in search of the new compassionate mail. Just a short while ago, I had the opportunity, the wonderful opportunity to have another conversation with our friend, Dennis Slattery. You know, these podcast episodes go deep. But I can tell you that the ones that Dennis and I have go so much deeper, and we never know where they’re going to end up, but they always end up someplace good. So let’s join that conversation. We’re on here talking and in the times that we’re able to sit over lunch, and I get home and Laurie says, What would you talk about? I don’t know. But how to make it fit? Oh, I felt great. We just covered so many things. Well, what was your bladder?

Dennis Slattery  01:43

But we both know, and this is how I’d phrase it, both of us know that erros was present. Because the relationship between us and then the topics that we move through, deepen. And that for me is when arrows is present in what is present in the classroom. The classes are terrific, they’re animated, people are thinking through things not to agree with each other, but to see what their own myth is.

Clay Boykin  02:16

Okay. All right. Tell Tell me more about arrows. What what?

Dennis Slattery  02:22

So one, one of my favorite books of young is the transcripts from a dream analysis seminars, 1928 to 1930 and youngest with either two or three, I think it’s to other analysts. And they’re taking dreams of maybe five, six sentences. That’s it. And then they’re working, and youngest listening to translations and he steps in and agrees and then he steps back every August. So one drain, about page 99. In this volume that is just scintillating reading. They’re working on a man’s screen, who is in a questionable in his dream and his questionable relationship with his daughter. And one of the analysts says, well, he’s in an incestuous erotic situation with his daughter and young kind of slams his fist down and he says, No, he’s in a deep relationship with his daughter because Aeros is about relationships. Now it can get perverted into pornography, lust, greed, but he says arrows is the presence, that energy presence of relationships that bind people together. And the dream was the unconscious narrative. Not about this man having a set said the the analyst wanted to liberalize it into a sexual relationship and, and Jung essentially said, No, it’s symbolic of a relationship that’s deep that this man has with his his daughter and boy, when I read that play, I thought that that is so helpful to understand though in our culture, the anything erotic is right away kind of Freudian sexually based, but for young, it was always the symbolic and that’s why I’ve read one time play that He personally analyzed over 80,000 dreams in his professional life.