Routledge At Home In The Language Of The Soul: Exploring Jungian Discourse and Psyche’s Grammar of Transformation

Language has a primary importance in Jungian psychology and its practice. C. G. Jung saw every act of speech as a psychic event. Even the "worker" words in language, like prepositions or conjunctions, carry particular archetypal energies, working dynamically and daimonically in the conduct of transformational narrative and realizing both personal and collective purposes. This book aims to deepen our consciousness of psyche’s speech as it occurs in our professional discourses, in the psychoanalytic encounter, in dreams, fairy tales, myths and poetry. Vividly exploring the grammar of psyche, we are urged to constantly kindle and rekindle our engagement with language. Review ‘A remarkable and uniquely important work, At Home in the Language of the Soul reveals the soul energies in the language that houses it. Essential reading for all those seeking psyche in/through words, Josephine Evetts-Secker gives to our language its archetypal essences, its making and poiesis. For therapists, artists, and seekers, this wonderful book diagnoses how very simple language structures form, direct, enact and embody the living psyche. At Home in the Language of the Soul is delicately written with the passionate clarity of a diamond. It is the book of life in our words; reading it is to enter the enchantments of soulful creation.’ - Susan Rowland, PhD, author, Jung as a Writer and C.G. Jung in the Humanities ‘This book does for words what C.G. Jung and James Hillman did for images – discovering amazing depths in prepositions and even in grammar and syntax. It made me realize that, truly, in the beginning was the word – and in the middle and in the end. Not so much a syntax of the soul, more assertion that syntax is soul. A serious (though deft and lucid) challenge to the primacy of image.’ - Professor Andrew Samuels, University of Essex About the Author Josephine Evetts-Secker was born and educated in England, graduated from University College London and later trained at the Jung Institute, Zürich. She developed a psychoanalytic practice in Canada while teaching English literature at the University of Calgary. She returned to Britain in 1997 where she is now in private practice. She has served on the council of the IGAP training programme (London) and the International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP) in Zürich. She is currently co-President of AGAP, an international association of analysts. She teaches and lectures for Jung societies in UK, Canada and USA. She has published poetry, articles, lectures and book chapters, and edited collections of fairy tales for Barefoot Books. As an ordained priest in the Anglican Church she serves as semi-retired priest in the Mulgrave parishes, north of Whitby.