Building a Symbolic Life with Light Lines: A Depth Psychological Practice for Symbol Formation and Creative Expression

Abstract

This dissertation examines the quandary of modern societal dislocation and fragmentation due to loss of traditional forms of making meaning and culture cohesion such as institutionalized religious affiliations, public education, and shared values community building.

This project’s approach to inquiry assigns agency to the individual seeking knowledge by bridging access from the self to universal patterns of wholeness—myths—by means of the language of domesticity and the occupations including bygone sayings, common symbols, and omnipresent images. The pedagogical aims are to recover knowledge of unconscious process and shape new receiving structures; identify constituent cognitive structures (archetypes) and patterns of completion (individuation); realize personal narrative in a global context to initiate an engaged creative life (mythopoiesis.)

The bridge-building mechanism and interpretive method presented is an original depth psychology application (Light Lines Practice.) The application’s creative process model focuses attention, makes meaning, and frames the seeker’s inquiry by means of a rhetorical invention template (a light ~ a phrase.) The trajectory and distillation of the method’s modes of perception yields the symbolic life roles, portal, and mandala. The symbolic roles are representations, integrations, and enactments of Light Lines aims of practice: to create new knowledge, find personal myth, and build a symbolic life.
My researches to establish the theoretical foundation of the model’s heuristic and hermeneutic include Ernst Cassirer’s explication of mythic imagination, Mircea Eliade’s concept of sacred and profane space, and Edward Corbett and Robert Connors’ five canons of rhetoric. To demonstrate application functionality, I analyzed Joseph Campbell’s four functions of myth, Rollo May’s personal narrative, and James Hillman’s psychology of the imagination. To abstract the model’s depth psychology lineage, I investigated C. G. Jung’s building game, Edward Edinger’s explication of Self, and Marie-Louise von Franz’s exposition of archetypes.

To confirm Light Lines as a feminine container model I consulted metaphor specialists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and studied the centrality of mother image in Sandplay Therapy.

This dissertation argues the practice of Light Lines ameliorates dislocation and fragmentation by reconnecting practitioners to unconscious process, patterns of wholeness, and models of symbolic life.