Education From The Heart

The main proposition of Jungian symbolic education is to rescue pleasure and emotion in teaching to make it experiential and not only rational and prone to forgetting.

For this purpose, it uses expressive techniques in the classroom to favor spontaneity and propitiate physical, emotional, imaginative, ludic-creative participation of teacher and student. The result is a method of teaching lively and useful, rooted in the pedagogic transference to form consciousness and social participation.

Expelling the Inquisition from the university, science centralized truth on the objective dimension. Unfortunately together with religious dogmatism, it expelled also the subjective dimension mainly intuition, feeling, introversion, ethics, faith, myth, magic and totality. In this manner ethics came to be taught out of the scientific method. From this dissociation emerged the method of learning without emotional experience and the great tendency to forget what is learned.

Psychiatrist Carlos Byington points out that this is the main problem of modern academic teaching inherited from the subjective-objective dissociation practiced in Western universities since the end of the eighteenth century.

Jungian symbolic education takes for model life and its natural way of teaching. Its theoretical base is Jungian symbolic psychology created by Carlos Byington, which describes archetypal patterns of consciousness doing symbolic elaboration coordinated by archetypes. It gives central emphasis to Jung's theory of the individuation process with contributions from psychoanalysis, mainly from Freud and Melanie Klein and from neo Jungians, such as Erich Neumann. It is a systemic theory of education which reunites Jean Piaget's constructivism with depth psychology introducing symbolic constructivism within the pedagogic transference.

This teaching method is provided by the teacher-student-school-family and society symbolic relationship rooted in an affectionate and creative model of solidarity which recommends this book not only for teachers but also for parents and media so that the debate we need in education may find here theoretical and practical contributions.

Carlos Byington is a medical doctor and psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, educator and historian. He went to high school in the US and graduated from medical school in Rio de Janeiro. He studied and was analyzed in psychoanalysis and afterwards trained in the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich - Switzerland. He is a founding member and first president of the Brazilian Society for Analytical Society and member of the International Society for Analytical Psychology.