About Dr. Jonathan Hyland

In my twenties I suffered from anxiety. Instead of medicating it I chose to try and understand it, but nothing seemed to work until I stumbled across Carl Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflection. In it I dimly understood that the unconscious was a deeper part of our experience that remained outside of our awareness, yet was something we could still feel. This was the most accurate explanation of my anxiety I had had until that point.

I committed myself to the study of depth psychology in a doctoral program in California. A few months in and my anxiety got much worse. I felt I had no choice but to aim my study of the unconscious directly at my anxiety. I did, and everything changed. Without realizing it I had started a conversation with my anxiety. It led the way. My course work shifted directions. I was thinking from a different part of myself.

Coyote

If I paid attention to and described the mysterious feeling of my anxiety, I would follow what it pointed to, the odd image of a coyote in my memory that led to a native american myth of Coyote. The strange behaviors and rituals I did for years, to try to manage my anxiety that I saw mirrored in the strange behavior of the mythical coyote. What was painfully inexplicable and incompatible to my life was now interfacing with a mythological image. Through this image I was able to begin the process of becoming conscious of my unconscious experience, what I had heretofore could only understand as anxiety.

Tactile Vision

Now that the anxiety had an appropriate form, my unconscious energy could move into consciousness and transform it. Which it did and I started to have experiences of visual perception where the sensation of touch and vision became confused when I looked at something. It happened often enough that I called it tactile vision. The tactile vision, like the anxiety, escaped my understanding and therefore I applied the same process of paying attention and describing the mysterious feeling of the experience.

Dream 1

But this time something different happened, as I began to describe the tactile vision, the description itself described an esoteric concept that I was studying, and a recent dream surfaced. As I wrote down the dream I realized the dream was depicting how my tactile vision was interfacing with the esoteric concept, in the same way the coyote myth interfaced with my anxiety.

The dream helped me understand that the tactile vision was not a disorder or experience of synesthesia, but an actual experience of the unconscious. I was slowly becoming aware of how the unconscious was subtly interwoven in our conscious experience, yet lacked form. At the same time I was noticing a parallel in Jung’s rethinking of the archetypes,

the psychoid factors I call archetypes . . . continually go beyond their frame of reference . . . but can occur just as much in circumstances that are not psychic (equivalence of an outward physical process with a psychic one). (Jung, 1952/1973, p. 99).

By this time I had just been introduced to Jung’s concept of the psychoid (seen above) which was concerned with an area of the unconscious that was neither matter nor psyche, but both. At that moment of my coursework I was studying the tradition of alchemy within Jung’s later work and was writing a paper trying to explore the psyche and matter interface through my own experiences. I fell asleep one night writing the paper and had a very long convoluted dream, similar in nature to the one mentioned above.

Dream 2: Chimera

The dream ended with a fragment that I experienced just before waking that stretched into waking. The fragment was a blue substance lapping up against me as if my body was the shore, and in the repetition and reverberation of the lapping waves I hear a voice, a woman’s voice, repeating the words “chimeran connection” over and over until I am awake. The physical sensation of the lapping waves stayed in my body throughout the day. I could not ignore it so I looked up the word chimeran. Chimera is a mythical form that is made up of different animals. The Chimera is identical to the Basilisk which was a symbol in the tradition of alchemy and the symbol Jung used to represent the psyche being freed from matter.

The mythic image of the chimera was giving form and meaning to my research up until that point, by connecting it to Jung’s own exploration of the psyche and matter interface.

Putting these mythical forms and experiences together allowed me to establish a methodology that explored the psyche and matter interface as a mysterious movement between my mind and my body.

For three years after my dissertation I taught general psychology at the college level where I tried to bring this methodological understanding of the unconscious to mainstream and popular concepts of what psychology is and isn’t, it was most effective in teaching the process of dream analysis.

And for three years after that I brought the same depth psychological understanding into the corporate sector successfully creating an archetype framework that allowed brands to become aware of archetypal energy in their brand and culture and then to become conscious and integrate this energy into their messaging, media and brand presence.

It is now, with my professional experiences teaching and researching at the doctorate and corporate level, that I bring the full force of this methodology to my practice with individuals where I believe it belongs and is most effective.

The unconscious is not a theory removed from our lives but it is our limit or edge and what strange things that lap against it, the thing to know is where your edge is and then let us start the conversation.