Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin
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PSYCHOLOGY
Beyond its focus on pathology rather than possibility and participation, another feature of conventional Western psychology that renders it incomplete and largely obsolete is that, like mainstream Western culture more generally, it is alienated from the greater Earth community — especially from nature’s untamed powers, qualities, species, and habitats. This is a core insight of the developing field of ecopsychology.8 What makes us human is not merely other humans. We evolved over millennia in response to the challenges and opportunities encountered within a wildly complex web of ecological relationships in a thoroughly animate world. The ways we think, feel, perceive, imagine, and act have arisen in attunement to the rhythms of the day and the turning of the seasons and in intimate relationship with myriad other life-forms and forces. Although in everyday Western life we might feel cut off from our wild Earthly roots and relationships, it nevertheless remains true that the deep structures of our human psyche — the underlying patterns, universal archetypes, innate capacities available to us all, and, yes, even the distinctive ways we are psychologically wounded and fragmented — have emerged from this living web.
What insights, then, about our human psyches appear when we return to Earth, when we remember that we are related to everything that has ever existed, when we reinstall ourselves in a world of spring-summer-fall-winter, volcanoes, storms, surf, bison, mycelium, Moon, falcons, sand dunes, galaxies, and redwood groves? What do we discover about ourselves when we consent again to being human animals — bipedal, omnivorous mammals with distinctive capacities for self-reflexive consciousness, dexterity, imagination, and speech? In what ways will we choose to live when we fully remember the naturalness and ecological necessity of death? Who will we see in the mirror when we face up to the present-day realities of human-caused mass extinction, ecosystem collapse, and climate destabilization? And what mystery journey will unfold when we answer the alluring and dangerous summons now emanating from the human soul, from the dream of the Earth,9 and from an intelligent, evolving, ensouled Universe?
Beyond insights into the nature of our humanity, what will we discover — or remember — about the most effective methods for cultivating our human wholeness once we liberate psychotherapy, coaching, education, and religion from indoor consulting rooms, classrooms, and churches? What happens when we rewild our techniques and practices for facilitating human development — not by merely getting them out the door and onto the land or waters, but, much more significantly, by fashioning approaches in which our encounters with the other-than-human world are the central feature? What happens, in other words, when we allow nature itself to be the primary therapist or guide, while the human mentor or adviser becomes more of an assistant to nature, an agent or handmaiden of the wild?
We have a vital opportunity now to shape a new Western psychology that acknowledges humanity as, first and foremost, natural, of nature — not separate from it. It’s time to rewild psychology with ideas and methods rooted in the rhythms, patterns, principles, and other-than-human encounters of greater nature. We seek a Western psychology firmly planted in both wild soil and the soul of the world, at once both an ecopsychology and a depth psychology, one that emboldens us to serve the greater Earth community and to enhance the life of all species, and that does not merely tempt us to use nature for our own healing, self-centered benefit, or egocentric profit. A mature ecotherapy does not attempt to decrease our anxiety, outrage, fear, grief, or despair in response to the ongoing industrial destruction of the biosphere; rather, it helps us to more fully experience these feelings so that we can revitalize ourselves emotionally and, in doing so, enable our greatest contributions to a cultural renaissance. This is our current collective human adventure, which theologian and cultural historian Thomas Berry calls the Great Work of our time: “to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”10 It is what ecophilosopher Joanna Macy refers to as the Great Turning, “the transition from a doomed economy of industrial growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world.”11
The Great Work of our time calls us to something greater than personal happiness and something more than mere refinements in politics, economy, religion, and education. At its most fundamental level, the Great Work necessitates both a revolution in our understanding of what it is to be human and a revival of our abilities to realize our potential and to transform our contemporary cultures.
It’s time, then, to redraw our map of the human psyche, a revision germinated not in notions of symptoms and illness but in our innate wholeness and our foundational and organic embedment in the natural world.
Toward these ends, this book introduces a holistic and integral ecology of the human psyche that encompasses the best insights of existing Western psychologies but also stretches far beyond them, extending our appreciation of the psyche’s untapped potentials and its inner diversity, intricacy, and structural elegance.
The Nature-Based Map of the Psyche highlights our positive, life-enhancing resources and perspectives and extols them as foundational to our humanity. The accent is not on our fragmented parts or wound stories, or how our psyches stall out in neurotic patterns, or how we might merely recover from trauma, pathology, or addiction; rather, the accent is on our wholeness and potential magnificence, how we can enhance our personal fulfillment and participation in our more-than-human world, and how we can become fully human and visionary artisans of cultural renaissance.
The Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche
To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness.
— GARY SNYDER
Wisdom traditions from around the world — including those from which Western cultures emerged — have looked to nature’s seven directions for a model of wholeness: north, south, east, west, up, down, and center. These seven directions support us in fathoming the wholeness of… well, anything that came out of the original wholeness called “nature” or “wilderness,” the wholeness that human beings came out of, as poet Gary Snyder reminds us. My approach to constructing a comprehensive, nature-based map of the human psyche begins with the foundational, three-dimensional pattern of the seven directions.1 Here’s how I’ve mapped the psyche onto nature’s framework:
The Horizontal Plane
THE SELF. In the four cardinal directions are the four facets of our innate human potential — the four sets of resources that make up our horizontal psychological wholeness. Together, these four facets constitute what I call the Self. As we’ll see in later chapters, they also reflect the qualities of the natural world we observe in the four directions and, not coincidentally, the characteristics of the four seasons and the four times of day: dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight.
SUBPERSONALITIES. Because each aspect of wholeness also has its immature form, we also find in the cardinal directions the four categories of our fragmented or wounded parts — which I call subpersonalities, and sometimes just subs for short — again echoing the qualities of the four directions, seasons, and times of day.
The Vertical Axis
SPIRIT. In the upward direction is the dimension of the human psyche that identifies with Spirit (a.k.a. God, Mystery, or the nondual). The upward direction is also known as the upperworld, the heavens, or the vast reaches of the cosmos.
SOUL. Reaching down into depths, we find the human Soul, our unique and deepest individual identity. The downward direction is also known as the underworld, Hades, or the fruitful darkness.
The Center
THE EGO. In the center, at the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical, is the Ego. Its “home” or “natural habitat” is the