Jungian symbolic education aims to rescue pleasure and emotion in teaching and learning and recast them as existential activities that are no longer merely rational and forgettable. It proposes the use of expressive techniques in the classroom to favor spontaneity and enhance the physical, emotional, imaginative, and creative participation of teacher and student. The result is a method of teaching that is lively and useful, rooted in the pedagogic transference, where consciousness is formed and social participation is refined. The symbolic method trains teachers to avoid dissociating the subjective and the objective dimensions and provides students with the opportunity to learn about the world with their whole being, by uniting reason, emotion, and creativity and reveal the pleasure of knowledge.
Jungian symbolic education takes as its model life and life’s natural ways of teaching. Its foundation is Carlos Byington’s theory of Jungian symbolic psychology, which describes archetypal patterns of consciousness by elaborating symbols coordinated by archetypes. It gives central emphasis to Jung’s theory of the individuation process with contributions from psychoanalysis, especially from Freud and Melanie Klein, and from analytical psychology, in particular from Erich Neumann. It is a systemic theory of education that unites Jean Piaget’s constructivism with depth psychology and positions symbolic constructivism within the pedagogic transference.
Education from the Heart, with many theoretical and practical contributions, is recommended not only for teachers and administrators, but also for parents and for those involved in the widespread and crucial debate on education.
Carlos Amadeu Botelho Byington, M.D., a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, graduated at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich and is a founding member of the Brazilian Society for Analytical Psychology. He is the author of numerous books, including Jungian Symbolic Education; The Development of Personality; Structure of Personality: Persona and Shadow; Symbolic Dimensions of Personality, as well as many articles
