Sharing a summary article of a talk by Susan Rowland, Ph.D., at the "Response at the Radical Edge: Depth Psychology for the 21st Century":
In myth, the Greek god Dionysus, perhaps best known as the god of grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy, was dismembered and is re-membered through bringing his disparate parts together into relationship with one another.
Historically, we have seen the evolution of a subject/object “split” in western culture, an arrangement which limits our beliefs that knowledge is objective, or only gained through certain kinds of objective research and hierarchal processes. Experiential understanding has largely been dismissed in the realm of science, which is currently favored in western society.
Changing society requires changing our ideas about education, specifically about disciplines including science, the arts, psychology, and religion. The idea of transdisciplinarity enables us to make connections among ideas, and to honor other ways of knowing.
In today’s polarized climate, with the emphasis on science as the key way of knowing, we have lost trust for “truth” in our collective sphere. It’s more important than ever that we pay attention to the opposites and that we honor Dionysus by finding ways to bring different disciplines into new and valuable liaisons in order to access new consciousness.
