Eros and the Value of Relatedness: Jung and Ochwiay Biano and the Lineage of an Enduring Friendship
WILLOW YOUNG
Sunday, December 13, 2020
4:00-6:00 pm PT on Zoom
Jung’s journey in December 1923-January 1924 to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, and his meeting of Ochwiay Biano (also known as Mountain Lake and Antonio Mirabal), member of the Taos Pueblo Tribal Council, demonstrated a characteristic relational capacity for which Jung and Analytical Psychology is noted. This initial encounter began a lineage of engagement, which has endured beyond Jung’s death. The ethical thread of authentic friendship carried by Jungian Analysts Dr. James Kirsch of Los Angeles, and Dr. William and Katie Sanford of Del Mar, California, continued beyond the death of Ochwiay Biano. In the spring of 1928, H. G. (Peter) Baynes and Cary De Angulo visited Mountain Lake on their way to California. As well, Analyst Dieter Baumann, visited Taos Pueblo in 1963, meeting with Biano’s granddaughter, carried on the lineage.
This presentation explores the experience of encounter and the necessary fundamental respect for and interest in an Other, in this case a person whose being and culture differ greatly from one’s own. Through the lens of the Jung/Ochwiay encounter and ensuing friendship, which greatly impacted Jung’s consideration of the Psyche and the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, I will expand upon the ethical response demonstrated by Jung to the reality of cultural and philosophical difference. In contemporary experience we are engaged in encounters with the other on a global scale and are asked to become conscious of the lived experience of others who are personally very different from ourselves and from each other. The tension of the opposites is pulled tight and the center point, at times, seems unable to endure the tension.
The tradition and practice of Analytical Psychology may offer a way to host an experience and encounter with the Other. The foundational practice of dream work and Active Imagination (with engaged attention to and relationship with dream figures, themselves often quite different from our outer world lived reality) may serve to support encounters of difference experienced in the outer world and make possible ensuing dialog, deep understanding, and reparation, holding as they do the seeds of potential mutual transformation and deep relatedness.
The presentation examines the relationship between Jung and Biano as a paradigm for experiencing ‘The other’; the paper also tells the story, based on letters from Dr. James Kirsch, Jungian Analyst to analysts Dr. William “Sandy” Sanford, and his wife Katie, of Kirsch’s request that the Sanfords ‘look after” Ochwiay Biano following Jung’s death in 1961. I will show a clip from a 2011 interview with Katie Sanford, in which she talks about her experience of Ochwiay Biano. Years of subsequent visits by the Sanfords to Taos Pueblo and correspondence between Biano and the Sanfords, are documented in the material collection of the Opus Archive, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpentaria, California.
Willow Young, LMFT, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Santa Barbara and Ventura, California. She is a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Study Center of Southern California and serves as an analytic supervisor. Retired as Distinguished Core Professor and Chair of the Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Willow continues to teach as Adjunct Faculty. She continues her analytic studies at the Research and Training Centre for Depth Psychology According to C.G. Jung and Marie Louise von Franz in Switzerland. For more information, visit www.willowyoung.com
For more information and registration, visit C.G. Jung Club of Orange County
