Dancing Between Two Worlds: Jung and the Native American Soul

In this thought-provoking and sensitive book, a noted Jungian scholar explores the deepest elements in the American psyche that need healing to bring forth the best in both of the worlds we walk in: the highly differentiated and technologically developed Western civilization and the indigenous native "soul" that is the essence of each human being. The author demonstrates that this soul is forcefully represented in America in the experience of the Native American peoples and their relationship to the land and to the ancient "indigenous one" at the heart of our human rights. The author explores not only the best of Native American spiritual thought to rediscover that soul, but also the terrible psychic damage done to later settlers by five hundred years of violence against the original peoples. He sketches positive directions that will create a partnership between the two worlds of our past and bring them together in a "dance" that will encourage a more redemptive spiritual order †

Fred R. Gustafson, a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich and a clergy member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is a psychotherapist in private practice, a pastoral counselor, and a Jungian analyst with Temenos Counseling Services in West Allis and Watertown Wisconsin.