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Coyote Speaks demonstrates how an analytically informed psychotherapist can utilize ideas from an archetypal perspective to increase the capacity of general psychotherapy to contact a patient's suffering. The author specializes in the psychotherapy of addictions and teaches professional seminars on the subject. He notes that: ‘This book is intended for health care professionals who face alcoholics and addicts in any stage of addiction, abstinence, or recovery’.
Rutzky employs the image of coyote as a heuristic tool through which he informs the practitioner on the fundamentals of the broad scope of addiction. He uses coyote image and metaphor to contain his teaching of basic psychotherapy strategies in the context of addiction, tying together the many disparate issues and considerations, such as co- dependence or the family system, in addiction diagnosis and treatment. This text is also useful as a teaching aid for psychotherapy courses on addiction.
The coyote is a Native American version of the trickster figure that functions to increase the awareness of the tribe through trickery and sacrifice. Jung notes in On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure that, ‘I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I called it the shadow’. (CW 9i, para. 469). Indeed this work demonstrates the shadow at work in addictions. It seems that the author uses the coyote stories to dramatize with imagery how he sees the shadow function in addiction.
Rutzky describes his struggles with his own limitations and for his own liberation through awareness of the trickster. (The trickster or shadow can function to facilitate consciousness.) The trickster is a basic form of the hero cycle representing instinctuality. The hero image evolves in Native American lore from animal imagery to outright human