Cultural Attitudes (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts)

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT Author of "William Everson: The Shaman's Call" In 1980 Joseph L. Henderson published a very interesting book called Cultural Attitudes in Psychological Perspective, where he basically came up with a quintessential model of the mind out of his years of studying Jung's collected writings. He names four of the cultural attitudes the "social, philosophic, religious, aesthetic" and to these four he adds a quintessential attitude, the psychological. This fifth attitude subsumes the other four cultural attitudes by including an overarching perspective that sees the role of psyche in the creation of life's meaning. In a paper called "The Artist's Relation to the Unconscious," Henderson also asserted that shamanism is historically the root for the prototype of the "seer-poet" (or what is called the "prophet-poet-sage"), and that all true philosophic attitudes arise from the archetype of the shaman. He mentions Pythagoras as an example in point. Later, in the same text, he included Hippocrates as the physician who subsequently became the first true scientist in the ancient world (Cultural Attitudes, 89-91). It is this deeper, shamanic domain of the human mind to which the literary critic and modern psychotherapist must turn for a solution to the problem of where the middle ground lies between the empirical and aesthetic branches of Jungian literary criticism. I must say, when I first read this book in 1997, I enjoyed it immensely. It gave me a unique understanding of how the Jungian analyst or psychotherapist must be sensitive to different shifts in attitude in the analytic conversations, and how the psychological attitude may hold the differing perspectives with diversity.