1. Advanced Clinical Skills: A Mythopoetic Approach
Susanna Ruebsaat PhDc sgruebsa@lynx.net
November 2013
A Mythopoetic Inquiry is a narrative of the imagination which creates an
alternate story to the dominant story (individually or collectively). We create the story as
we are living it; writing the narrative at the same time as we are reading it to ourselves
and the world. Creating a vision while seeing; an imaginative vision about what is and
what can be.
A mythopoetic inquiry has its own logic but also needs to connect to reality. Art
making (and other creative activities), can be a bridge between imagination and reality;
letting the art tell the story from that liminal place between the conscious and
unconscious. It is important to consider that there are practical aspects of this imagining.
As humans we have a shared imagination (myths and archetypes) that is the common
ground of this imagining.
Myth: of or relating to the making of myths: narrative. self-story, life-story that
explains how the world (or individual or group) and humankind came to be the way they
are.
Poetic: poetry is a language of reflexivity rather than reflection.
Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect.
A Mythopoetic Inquiry assumes there is an alternate story present that is
working on us. This story or narrative hints at a deeper, underlying sensibility or
imagining that "bends back on", refers to, and affects the inquirer, while nudging towards
participating more consciously with the logic of “otherness” this story proposes. Such
an inquiry creates a way of bringing polarities together through a sideways step in
perception and making. A new narrative – imagine my story reflected in your story –
building a dialogue, dreaming together. Big universal as well as highly personal questions
and motifs can be asked here: Am I how I see myself? Am I how I think of myself? Why
are we here? Through these questions we can discern what kind of sensibilities we are
bringing to personal and collective issues.
Susanna Ruebsaat 2013 1

2. Foreword
The true meaning of a mythopoetic inquiry lies in your experience which you, the
practitioner are the subject/object of.
A Mythopoetic Inquiry is not ‘about’ anything. It is not ‘about’ mythopoesis; entering the
liminal; loss; loving one’s fate; or liberation. It is not ‘about’ archetypal activism; the
diaphoric imagination; or the arts. It is not even ‘about’ intention/extension;
teaching/learning; therapy/healing. It is rather, simply an expression of all the above. It is
through the performance of all of these notions with their many voices that speak through
you, that there is any meaning at all.
A mythopoetic inquiry is not intended to inform you, fellow inquirer, of anything.
Instead, its intention and extension is your own experience as you travel through the
images that arise in your journey with the many voices and ‘guests’ of Psyche the text
may invite or invoke. Through summoning these voices/guests you as author/performer,
may embark on your own mythopoetic inquiry, be that the exploration of consciousness;
wholeness; self-actualization; re-embodiment; transformation; or the nature of
perception; the symbolic; deep democracy and deep time.
With you, fellow practitioner, as participant with mutual authorship, this 2-day
mythopoetic inquiry together might – possibly – be a rapprochement of the conscious and
unconscious, an act of healing.
Stepping into the Mythopoetic Inquiry
What would it be like to experience a mythopoetic way of being? What
would it be like to develop such a sensibility that is engaged in an imaginal1
encounter with life that includes a connection to the archetypal realm through
images and symbols: an active symbolic way of being? Developing a
mythopoetic sensibility is active in the sense of taking the myth, the literal, the
original story or self-narrative and communicating it at a level of import and
depth: mythopoesis itself now functioning as a living myth.
The interplay of memory and mythopoesis forces me to see through
the remembered story with a shock of re-cognition of how this myth is actively
changing as I speak/write/paint it. This myth that is making me, is making me see
it! It is joining me in the re-creation of something that does not yet exist. Unborn
awarenesses. As I re-cognize/embody this new creation, I begin to
1
“The Imaginal…is nearer to the language of the arts than it is to the language of concepts…a
speech of the lost power of the soul…psychological language may thus have to find its kinship,
not with the language of scientific reason or with the exercises of behaving well, but with the
arts” (Hillman, 1977, p. 180).
Susanna Ruebsaat 2013 2

3. see/feel/sense a new presence replacing an absence I have not consciously
entered.
Making the move from literal seeing and telling (or
somatizing/symptomizing) your story, into the word/image as its embodiment, is
an archetypal action that challenges the story in the very moment it is being
communicated. The diaphoric impulse is present and actively emerging from the
metaphoric, like the butterfly making its way out of the cocoon that had been
protecting its predecessor, the larva.
Let me propose something immediate regarding the above as a
means of entering your own mythopoetic inquiry:
Am I how I see myself?
Am I how I think of myself?
Or am I myself simply a way of seeing?
Steps:
1) Deep Democracy2
2) Archetypal Activism3
2
“Unlike "classical" democracy, which focuses on majority rule, Deep Democracy suggests that
all voices, states of awareness, and frameworks of reality are important. Deep Democracy also
suggests that all the information carried within these voices, levels of awareness, and frameworks
is needed to understand the complete process of a system. Deep Democracy is an attitude that
focuses on the awareness of voices that are both central and marginal. ..This type of awareness
can be focused on groups, organizations, one's own inner experiences…. “The method of deep
democracy focuses on the ability of the facilitator [ego] to use his or her awareness to notice,
value and follow all of the people and parts [images] of a given group [individual psyche] in
consensus reality, as well as noticing and valuing the more dreamlike expressions and feelings of
a group [individual]” (Deep Democracy Institute, 2009).
3
As archetypal activists we are called to be synthetic (i.e. dialectical) in order to facilitate
bringing together the fragmented polarities of the culture in such a way that the existential tension
of opposites is maintained while the opposites interact mutually, engaging without definitive
dominance. In this way polarities may reflectively energize and activate each other, reflecting
through distinction ((McNamara, 2010).
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4. 3) Diaphoric Imagination4
4) Mythopoetic Inquiry5
In a mythopoetic process (which may include narrative inquiry, autobiographical inquiry,
poetry and art making as movements of the psyche), dis-eases/disturbances can act as
guiding metaphors that lead to the diaphoric imagination. Originating from the
trauma/initiation that has been asking for attention of a different kind response than
“curing” it, a mythopoetic inquiry offers transformation/transfiguration/trans-illumination
vs. further wounding: survival.
A mythopoetic inquiry has image as the essence of the work – word/images.
What happens when mythopoesis becomes art?
The process unfolds and is informed simultaneously by the word/image – a reflexive,
moment by moment attending and manifesting through body and body of art materials.
To students:
1. “Try out” some of the existential questions you encounter in you own journey.
2. Moving into gestures, journeying yourself into place.
3. Listen to the questions that arise (internally and externally) as if they are a pebble
tossed into a pool.
4. Then observe the rings that ripple out from where the pebble entered your being.
5. In this way of listening the questions allow you to inquire into the
intersubjectivity (inner and outer ‘realities’) present.
6. In indigenous traditions all has voice, gesture and action in conjunction with
other voices. We know about the world because we embody the polyphonic
voices of the world. Thus we know ourselves and the world as one breath: in-
breath/out-breath.
4
“The essential possibility of diaphor lies in the broad ontological fact that new qualities and new
meanings can emerge, simply come into being, out of some hitherto ungrouped combination of
elements.” (McGaughy,1997, p. 277).
“The take-it-or leave- it attitude that is implicit in all good metaphor is in itself so far as it goes,
diaphoric; the sense of an invisible finger ambiguously pointing is epiphoric. The role of epiphor
is to hint significance; the role of diaphor is to create presence. Serous metaphor demands both...
diaphor emerges from the metaphor” (Wheelwright, 1962, p. 192),
5
A mythopoetic inquiry enables a kind of seeing which has been born of the metaphor my
myth/narrative/self-story is. A mythopoetic inquiry changes the eye/I. This eye/I now sees
through the image to see the way the image sees.
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5. 7. So take this holistic knowledge home, and into the world through relationships
(intrapsychic; in your art; and therapy practice); even with the non-sentient –
aesthetically (art materials).
8. This is a holistic bringing together
Look into feelings (your own and clients’) that might be connected to a sense of
hopelessness that comes as if from ‘under the skin’ from unexpressed traumas: places of
depression, anxiety; inner devastation that make it difficult to 'make a new life'. It may be
that these places of trauma have a taboo against mourning, necessary for a true new life
to emerge from the original story or script (familial, gendered, social, cultural, ethnic
etc.). This taboo may be experienced as a sinister force that is not even personal but is
somatized (in the body), which holds the trauma as default, and therefore experienced as
personal, prevalent, and pervasive.
"Relevant events in a patients' history, which we have been in the habit of viewing as
causes of current psychopathology, may now perhaps been seen as manifestations of the
beginning life pattern. Traumatic events of childhood...may perhaps be seen as essential
landmarks in the actualization of a pattern of wholeness, as the necessary "suffering of
the soul", which engenders present and future psychological advance." (P. 186-187)
Whitmont, E. (2007). The Destiny Concept in Psychotherapy. Journal of Jungian Therapy
and Practice, vol. 7, no. 1
Navigating a Mythopoetic Inquiry
1. What is a mythopoetic inquiry and what does it offer that other forms of inquiry
do not?
2. What is the import it holds that is connected to developing insight and
transforming one’s life?
3. What are the steps in a mythopoetic inquiry? (theoretical definitions offered).
a) Telling one’s self-story or narrative (self image).
b) Practicing “deep democracy”.
c) Practicing “archetypal activism”.
d) Inviting the “diaphoric imagination”: with instructions for art making activities.
4. How does a mythopoetic inquiry affect the original story/myth as it becomes re-
embodied as a presence in-the-world in art making?
5. How does this re-embodied presence in turn affect the participant?
6. What is awakened through the participation and deep listening of the myth?
7. What is the nature of the “presence” that becomes embodied in the
participant/listener of the original myth, and what is its importance for living a
more deeply fulfilling life?
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6. Benefits of Practicing Mythopoesis:
• Becoming aware of deep possibly repressed experiences of loss: of what
has actually been lost, or what one has never achieved (one’s life dream;
the life unlived). Homeland: homeland of parents for which the longing
has been inherited.
• Opening the possibility of mourning the dream—the mourning of what has
been lost, or never even achieved—and moving towards a perspective of
loving one’s fate: a sacred way of seeing.
• Illuminating this sacred way of seeing/being as a path of ‘letting go’ and
‘seizing hold’ of life towards one’s fate; and falling in love with this
continuous revelation of the mysteries of Self.
• Learn short, simple art making activities that allow the unconscious to
reveal to us our unlived life and then enter it through the embodiment in
the art.
• Reflecting on the process of the art making, and the resulting images as a
doorway to living a more symbolic life where previously unimagined
possibilities that have been present in the unconscious all along, become
accessible to the conscious mind.
.
Susanna Ruebsaat 2013 6

7. Benefits of Practicing Mythopoesis:
• Becoming aware of deep possibly repressed experiences of loss: of what
has actually been lost, or what one has never achieved (one’s life dream;
the life unlived). Homeland: homeland of parents for which the longing
has been inherited.
• Opening the possibility of mourning the dream—the mourning of what has
been lost, or never even achieved—and moving towards a perspective of
loving one’s fate: a sacred way of seeing.
• Illuminating this sacred way of seeing/being as a path of ‘letting go’ and
‘seizing hold’ of life towards one’s fate; and falling in love with this
continuous revelation of the mysteries of Self.
• Learn short, simple art making activities that allow the unconscious to
reveal to us our unlived life and then enter it through the embodiment in
the art.
• Reflecting on the process of the art making, and the resulting images as a
doorway to living a more symbolic life where previously unimagined
possibilities that have been present in the unconscious all along, become
accessible to the conscious mind.
.
Susanna Ruebsaat 2013 6