Jungian Dimensions of the Mourning Process, Burial Rituals and Access to the Land of the Dead

This is a remarkable collection of essays on our relations with the dead and the mourning process. The authors are wide-ranging in their areas of expertise, drawing from social anthropology, history, philosophy, Jungian studies, and psychoanalysis, but together they provide both broad and penetrating insight into this most personal of our universally human concerns. Dr Brodersen is to be commended for this fine contribution to Thanatology studies. Dr Roger Brooke, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Jungian scholar, Duquesne University, author of Jung and Phenomenology. Like the vegetative nervous system that regulates digestion, heart rate and breathing without our having to think about them, many of our rituals of mourning operate beneath the surface to smooth the passages of life to death. This daring and complex volume explores those rituals and passages from many cultures intended to move us from this life to the next, although the transition is often seen to be anything but effortless for the living and the dead. Thomas Singer, MD. Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychoanalyst, editor of the award-winning Cultural Complexes and The Soul of America Jungian analysts and scholars have come together in this rich and creative collection to explore the universal facets of death, dying and the mourning processes that affect all of us. The content will appeal to therapists working with the archetypal in grief and dreams of the dead. Equally, those interested in the historic terrain of the land of the dead and burying rituals will find an anthropological sensibility to the topics. The collection is a significant contribution that expands collective psychoanalytic knowledge by assisting clients to traverse these experiences around death. This will inevitably become a seminal collection and resource in future for Jungians. Dr Stephani Stephens, Psychotherapist and a lecturer in Counselling at the University of Canberra in Canberra, Australia and author of C.G.Jung and the Dead; Visions, Active Imagination and the Unconscious Terrain. The wide-spread contents and different perspectives on death, mourning processes, burial rituals and intimations of immortality assembled in this book address various cross-cultural approaches to various aspects of death. As an archetypal experience, death has and will always raise many unanswered questions that challenge all of us. The present book is an attempt to address these issues from a Jungian point of view. Each author gives profound insight based on his or her personal field of interest and is written from the heart. This is indeed a courageous book that will help the reader to confront difficult issues and find a larger view on a life experience that is often feared, but inevitable. Evy Tausky, Jungian Training Analyst and Supervisor, President of the Curatorium of the C.G. Jung-Institute, Zurich