Jung’s cultural writing: spiral essays and performing symbols (in literature)

Performance is a key ingredient of Jung’s writings on culture and of the function of the Jungian symbol in literature. This paper will compare and contrast Jung’s performance of cultural analysis and healing in his essays with the way his notion of the symbol works in literature to knit the individual psyche into the collective. It will explore Jung’s unique essay form of the spiral as a literary innovation, and look at the way a Jungian reading of literary reveals a significant contribution to cultural studies. [From the Author]

The interprofessional practitioner: changing professional identity in social work

Twenty years ago the first joint training programme in learning disability nursing and social work was established as a collaborative project to develop practitioners able to work holistically with people with learning disabilities. Since then a number of programmes have continued this work and more recently the approach has developed in the mental health specialism. These programmes have changed the nature of singular social work education and created a new region of knowledge (Bernstein, 2000) for those who have experienced them. What began as a radical experiment in interprofessional education has been sustained by a strong commitment to the belief that the practitioners who qualify from such programmes are well equipped to support people with learning disabilities in changing and multi-professional services. As with much interprofessional education, however, there is an ongoing need to build an evidence base linking such education with successful outcomes in practice. This paper presents and explores the outcomes of a doctoral research study aimed at evaluating the impact of joint training in learning disability nursing and social work on the professional identity, skills and working practices of practitioners who undertook it. The research was undertaken with almost fifty jointly trained practitioners and involved a national survey followed by semi-structured interviews. The results suggest that practitioners who experience the dual socialisation inherent in this type of training found both gains and losses in the process. They appear to emerge, however, with a confidence, resilience and breadth of knowledge which were part of the early vision for this transformative approach to professional training. Bernstein B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield (USA).

Venus infers

These poems mark the fault lines of myth, dream and memory, of a doubled identity emerging from the clash of war, desire and the cacophony of the city. 1974/Dead Sister , a narrative poem with a cast that includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Freud’s Dora, the Lady of Shalott, Ophelia, Esther, female cowboys and other deposed goddesses is ‘an autobiography’ of an imaginary dead twin. Alev Adil delineates the traces of a sense of displacement, but while the poems mark those frenetic uncertainties and erasures they celebrate the plenitude of new stories, epistemologies and possibilities born out of falling into fracture (the fracture of memory, gender, identity, culture) more than they mourn any loss. Venus Infers is haunted by the deities of ancient Greek myths and their contemporary manifestations. Eurydice is hiding out in Hackney, sometimes glimpsed on the Jubilee Line; Ariadne remembers her ancient palace as she prowls the endless corridors of a London hotel; Penelope still waits for peace in the ruins of Marash/Varosha. Cyprus often features in these poems, both as a landscape for myth and as a site for contemporary, and contested, memories. [From the Author]

Individual crisis episodes and cultural transition: finding the macrocosm in the microcosm

According to dialogical self theory (Hermans, 2001), individual identities reflect cultural and subcultural values, and appropriate voices and discourses from the social environment. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) systemic theory of human development similarly postulates that individual and social development occur in a symbiotic and interdependent fashion. It would therefore be predicted that individual changes in identity reflect macrocosmic changes in cultural values and social structures. The current study investigated narratives of crisis transitions within adults aged 25-40, by way of interviews with 22 participants. An intensive qualitative analysis showed that the narratives of crisis could indeed be viewed as individual manifestations of contemporary cultural changes. National statistics and academic research have documented in the UK substantial cultural shifts over the last twenty years including the lessening popularity of marriage, the rise of freelance and portfolio careers and the growth of accepted alternative gender roles. In individual crises, changes made over the course of the episode were invariably in the same direction as these social changes; towards flexible work patterns, non-marital relationships and redefined gender identities. Before the crisis, participants described their identity as bound into an established discourse of conventionality, a traditional sense of masculinity or feminitity and a singular career role, while after the crisis alternative and fluid identities are explored, and identity is less defined by role and institution. These findings show that changes in the social macrocosm can be found in the individual microcosm, and therefore support dialogical self theory.