EDUCATION FROM THE HEART
Book: EDUCATION FROM THE HEART – A Jungian Symbolic Perspective
Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 2010, 357pp.
Autor: Carlos Amadeu Botelho Byington*
Resume
TO FORGET WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED IS THE RISK OF TRADITIONAL TEACHING. TO TAKE WITH YOU DURING LIFE THE EXPERIENCE YOU HAD IN THE CLASSROOM IS THE INTENTION OF JUNGIAN SYMBOLIC EDUCATION.
“This method of teaching seeks to avoid two great reductions which mutilate reality and know/edge. The first one is positivism and materialism which imprison knowledge in the inhuman truth of the object. The second one is to avoid esoterism which does not differentiate subjective imagination from objective perception”.
The symbolic method intends to turn each teacher into someone who does not dissociate the subjective and the objective dimensions and each student into a person who learns about the world with his whole being. This is possible when learning unites reason and emotion and creativity enjoys the pleasure of knowledge.
“No one forgets neither what was learned through the filter of emotions nor that which symbolic games fused with his/her own unconscious .” MARINA COLASANTI, writer.
“Symbolic science described by Carlos Byington is a new form to understand modern humanism.”
Prof. Dr. MARIO EUGENIO SAIZ-LAUREIRO, Catholic University of Uruguay.
The main proposition of Jungian symbolic education is to rescue pleasure and emotion in teaching to make it existential and not only rational and prone to forgetting.
For this purpose, it uses expressive techniques in the classroom to favor spontaneity and propitiate physical, emotional, imaginative, ludic-creative participation of teacher and student. The result is a method of teaching lively and useful, rooted in the pedagogic transference to form consciousness and social participation.
Expelling the Inquisition from the university, science centralized truth on the objective dimension. Unfortunately, together with religious dogmatism, it expelled also the subjective dimension mainly intuition, feeling, introversion, ethics, faith, myth, magic and totality. In this manner ethics came to be taught out of the scientific method. From this dissociation emerged the method of learning without emotional experience and the great tendency to forget what is learned.
Psychiatrist Carlos Byington points out that this is the main problem of modern academic teaching inherited from the subjective-objective dissociation practiced in Western universities since the end of the eighteenth century. Jungian symbolic education takes for model life and its natural way of teaching. Its theoretical base is Jungian symbolic psychology created by Carlos Byington. which describes archetypal patterns of consciousness doing symbolic elaboration coordinated by archetypes. It gives central emphasis to Jung’s theory of the individuation process with contributions
from psychoanalysis, mainly from Freud and Melanie Klein and analytical psychology, mainly from Erich Neumann. It is a systemic theory of education which reunites Jean Piaget’s constructivism with depth psychology originating symbolic constructivism within the pedagogic transference.
*CARLOS AMADEU BOTELHO BYINGTON is a doctor. He went to secondary school in the United States of America, qualified in medicine and psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro and completed his post-graduate studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. On returning to Brazil, in 1965, Byington expanded Jung’s archetypal concept to include Individual and Collective Consciousness. In 1983, by studying the socio-cultural transformation process in Latin America, he formulated the Archetypal Theory of History, based on the ideas of Hegel, Jung, Bachofen, and Erich Neumann’s Mythological Theory of Consciousness. According to Byington, all psychic functions are archetypal structuring functions of Consciousness. He attributes a central position to envy, as important as sexuality, love, strive for power, jealousy and fear.
Author of Byington is the author of many books and articles, two of which have been translated to English and published by Chiron:
CREATIVE ENVY – The rescue of one of civilization’s major forces, and JUNGIAN SYMBOLIC PSYCHOLOGY: The Voyage of Humanization of the Cosmos in Search of Enlightenment.
