Our Mythologium 2021 keynote speaker will be Dennis Patrick Slattery, PhD. In keeping with our theme of myth and healing, Dennis’s talk is called “Healing into Wholeness: Healing as Myth and Method.” If you already know Dennis’s work, you’ll understand why we’re so thrilled to have him join the program. If you don’t know his work yet, your soul is in store for a treat.
Healing into Wholeness: Healing as Myth and Method
Indeed, healing may not necessarily be identical with saving or preserving life. – Edward Whitmont, The Alchemy of Healing
We are each a series of paradoxes — patient and healer, infected and inflected, afflicted and blessed, a wound and a wonder. At times it seems that most mythologies and stories that accrue from them are concerned with qualities of being bloodied and blessed, scourged and saved at the same time. Each of these ands involves a myth seeking expression, shaping our plot-line and infusing our embodied blood-line, a vehicle for the flow of our life’s energy. Every healing is haunted by the shadows of an earlier infection.
This presentation will explore the power of a contagion as a large encompassing metaphor, to heal as it wounds. Such a pollution can be an occasion, even opportunity, for the gods to enter the arena to provoke us into a level of awareness that we could not have understood without an invasive infection that inflects our lives into a greater mytho-spiritual consciousness.
About Dennis
Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D. has been teaching for 52 years, the last 26 in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 30 volumes, including 7 volumes of poetry and one novel co-authored with Charles Asher. His most recent titles include Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit, co-authored with Deborah Ann Quibell and Jennifer Leigh Selig, and From War to Wonder: Recovering Your Personal Myth Through Homer’s Odyssey. His most recent collection of essays is An Obscure Order: Reflections On Cultural Mythologies. In addition, he has published over 200 articles, book reviews and op-ed pieces. He offers writing retreats on C.G. Jung’s The Red Book as well as on Writing One’s Personal Myth through the works of Joseph Campbell and other mythologists. He has been taking painting classes in water color and acrylics for the past 8 years. For recreation he enjoys the pleasures of walking in nature, lap swimming at a local recreation center, and riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle with his sons Matt and Steve in the Texas Hill Country.
Dennis’s email is dslattery@pacifica.edu and his new website is available at www.dennispatrickslattery.com.