human history as the desire for freedom and diversity and communion
Focussing on desire as the living process essential to relational psychology, this website explores Toni Wolff's relational schema for its contemporary psychological value and to suggest that the containing archetypal form of relationship itself evolves-- from the parent to the youth, from care to desire as the relational core of evolution.
Although we illustrate Wolff's schema--as she did--with feminine relational forms, we pay attention to masculine forms as well and to Wolff's ideas of the problem of the single form (a faux innocence) and shadow expressions of relational psychological life . We illustrate the containing hetaira/puer form as we find contemporary expressions of it.
We acknowledge our philosophical debt to Gregory Bateson's contention that evolution is the process of species maintaining their relationship with the environment. We also acknowledge Rosi Braidotti's Nomadic Theory and her insights into Gilles Deleuze' vision of nomadic theory as a political theory of becoming. Viewing desire as the only possible way to undertake the process of becoming, Braidotti understands that one must actually be attracted to change the way one wants a lover--in the flesh. Nomadic becoming is a theory of ontological and non-figurative desire.
Visionary dreamwork engaged Toni Wolff on the very day of her death. With British art therapist Irene Champernowne Wolff poured over a series of drawings from Champernowne's most recent dreams. These drawings included a scene in which two women contemplate circular objects hovering in space. Later Carl Jung referred to Champernowne's drawings in his analysis of flying saucers as the archetype central to contemporary life. Champernowne's visions of round objects suggest a creative vacuum of pure space--a 20th century notion from physics. As such her dreams may be expressing the artist-seer's vision of life coming to be from a creative feminine force. The round objects as dream anomalies may signify an openhearted curiosity entangled with possibilities and engaged with the material world. Because Toni Wolff died shortly after her session with Champernowne, we do not know what else Wolff may have recognized in her patient's dream of round objects and two women suspended in space. We include musical expressions of the relational forms.
If Wolff's four relational forms, once contained in the energy of the Earth Mother, are at present contained by an emergent Hetairan energy, contemporary life offers a focus on individual and personal relational actualization. A dynamic system suggests that archetypal puer/hetairan energy is influencing each form and infusing all relationship with exploratory openness. We suggest that discoveries of evolutionary planetary history are the unfolding story of an increasingly rich diversity of relationships in a community in which all life forms--animals, rivers, habitats, valleys, trees, stars, are contained archetypally by the newly emergent.
Welcome to evolvingdeepforms.com