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In his latest essay, archetypalist-in-residence, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza returns, after his last excursion into myth with Hermes and His Children, to take up the myth of Dionysus. Like the clinician who receives the projective identifications of a patient and metabolizes them in a way to make them understandable, Lopez-Pedraza digests the collective material of this myth and disgorges insightful elaborations on the particular form of human existence portrayed by a Dionysian sensibility. He tells us that the quintessence of the Dionysiac experience is that of embodiment and deep emotion, and wonders why Dionysus, ‘the most psychiatric of the Greek gods’, madness being one of his attributes, has not been studied previously in the field of mental illness.
Throughout the essay, Lopez-Pedraza obeys his own rallying cry of archetypal theorists (‘We must stick to the image!’) by closely following several historical sources, which delineate and amplify the various images in the Dionysian myth, in successive sections of the monograph. Early on, he contrasts the two personified forces of the Titans and Dionysus as a dynamic opposition in human nature: that of unbound, excessive energy with the more ‘divine’, here-and-now presence of the Olympian god. The dismemberment of the young Dionysus by the Titans, a representation of early childhood trauma, represents the core of the myth: the inevitable repression of body and emotion.
In the later sections, Lopez-Pedraza expounds the major iconography of Dionysus, which emphasizes the god's psychology as it is rooted in the emotions and in the living of life as destiny: wine, women, community, tragic and comic theatre, androgyny, dancing, and old age through illness and death. Lopez-Pedraza is at his best when exemplifying meanings useful to psychotherapy and living culled from mythic imagery. For example, he states,
As a psychotherapist, it is my immediate concern to appear to reflect on my own Titanism, which tends to appear in preconceiv