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Considering that ANZSJA, the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts, has only a couple of dozen members, it is a remarkable feat that they have produced this book containing papers by twelve of them. Its most distinctive feature is a rare sensitivity to the interaction between culture and psyche, informed by the particular circumstances of the Australian experience, especially the painful history of the incoming Europeans’ treatment of Australia's indigenous peoples. These historical and cultural circumstances have produced a deep concern with questions of collective, cultural and personal identity.
Many papers inhabit a liminal landscape of borders and borderline experience - not only the borders between different cultures, but also the borders between the psyche and the physical world, ranging from the somatic body to the ‘landmarks’ of geological landscape. Jungian psychology proves to have much to offer in the search for a conceptual framework through which these liminal experiences may be understood: for example, several authors draw upon Jung's idea of the psychoid level where the worlds of spirit and matter are experienced as being two aspects of the same ‘substance’.
For this reviewer, the highlight of the book is Craig San Roque's ‘Coming to terms with the country’, which describes a series of remarkable incidents in his initial encounters with Aboriginal thought and locations. San Roque explores the central value and function of the Tjukurpa (‘dreaming’) in indigenous psychic and cultural life. Through his own vivid experience of an indigenous sacred site, he shows us the vast gulf that exists between Western and indigenous worldviews. Although his analytic skill in the use of imagery and symbolic thinking offers him (and the reader) a way into the language and myth of indigenous thinking, he also conveys the enormity of the task involved - one that, he says, few professional ‘health’ people seem prepared to undertake.
San Roque's chapter is f