pickI loved this! Neville looks at the emerging trends of the COVID pandemic as they appeared in 2020 via the lens of Jungian psychology mediated by the Ancient Greek pantheon. His insights are fascinating, and his predictions and cautionings largely accurate, which is unfortunate given the post-pandemic exacerbation of authoritarianism.
It's interesting to be reminded of the strangeness of the period, and of the prevailing hopes and fears. 5⭐
"The COVID19 crisis seems to be demanding what is conventionally referred to as 'strong leadership'. However we may reasonably be concerned that it is also contributing to a phenomenon which is already manifest - a global inflation of the Zeus archetype, observed in the deterioration of democracy and the increasing power of people described by Noam Chomsky as "sociopathic buffoons"."
"If we take the lead from archetypal psychology, the Greek pantheon can provide us with a language for talking about a wide range of distinct philosophies, value systems, energies, feeling states, habits of behaviour and political ideologies. It enables us to avoid accepting a single perspective on the climate crisis or the COVID19 crisis and our psychological response to them as representing the whole truth about these phenomena. ⬇️
This quarter's Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies journal is a tribute edition to Australian psychologist-therapist Bernie Neville, who died in 2021. I haven't come across his work before, but it sounds interesting as he blends the Jungian archetypes of the Ancient Greek gods with the person-centred psychology of Carl Rogers.
He wrote the tagged book in 2020, his perspective on how these processes were playing out during the pandemic.
Gods in a Time of Corona | 
