Jung, Ecopsychology, and the Tao: A Course With Dennis Merritt

Jung believed that in 1940 we were entering a “new age,” the Age of Aquarius, terms he would apply to the paradigm shift that he said had to come to the West and to countries affected by the West, which now includes the whole world. This shift would have an ecological framework as all our systems — political, economic, educational, psychological and spiritual — will have to be radically reformed to re-incorporate humans into the natural world to live sustainably. Ecopsychology emerged in the 1990s to examine our dysfunctional relationship with the environment and to develop ways for modern men and women to connect more deeply with nature.

Every layer of the collective unconscious can be examined to those ends. At the indigenous level of the collective unconscious, there is a reciprocal and sacred relationship with nature. Noted Native American writer and philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. said Jungian psychology was the best Western framework for relating to the indigenous world view. This relates to the philosophy of Tao, which embodies a cosmology rooted in the Earth’s mysterious generative force, with its unending cycles of life, death, and rebirth.  

Dennis Merritt, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., grew up on a small dairy farm in Wisconsin where he established a deep connection with the animals and the land. He obtained a master’s degree from Sonoma State in humanistic psychology and a Ph.D. from Berkeley in insect pathology (microbial control of insect pests) before training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Since 1983, his analytic practice has been in Madison and now in Milwaukee, WI. He is the author of four volumes of The Dairy Farmer’s Guide to the Universe: Jung, Hermes, and Ecopsychology.  Vol. 3 presents Hermes as the god of synchronicity, dreams, ecopsychology, and complexity theory, the link between the 10,000 things and the Tao. Dr. Merritt has also written numerous articles, including ones on Jung and the environment, “Hunger Games,” “Guns and the American Psyche,” and dreams and the I Ching.