Psyche & Imagination - Online Abstract
Academic Presentations

James Barrett & Ann Skea

Ted Hughes’ use of the Cabbalah in Birthday Letters: an experiential consideration of disciplined active imagination

It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.

This workshop/round table will explore the practical use of Cabbala as an aid to the development of visual imaginative recreation for healing purposes; as a tool for exploring and understanding the psyche; and as a mnemonic for the training of memory. It is based on a traditional representation of Neo-Platonic Cabbalistic lore on a Tree of Life and on the many mnemonic aids which are linked to this Tree.

Ann Skea is an independent scholar whose work on Ted Hughes has been widely recognised. James Barrett is a practising psychotherapist currently researching the relationships between the work of Ted Hughes and Carl Jung.

Ted Hughes once told an interviewer that he had read all of Jungs works in translation very early on but had tried to avoid knowing them too well. This, he said, had probably freed him to use them all the more. So, throughout his life, he used myth, symbol, imagination and memory to explore the natural energies in order to achieve wholeness and healing for himself and others; and psyche was, for him, an essential part of the natural energies. Hughess creative work shows, too, that his exploration was done within various traditional, practical and spiritual frameworks magic, shamanism, alchemy and, finally, in the very personal Birthday Letters and Howls & Whispers, the complex and difficult framework of Cabbala.

What we think of as personal, or, as happening out of relationship with another is a participation in the world as psyche, infinite and ordinary. Discoveries of meaning are revelations of psyche. Or, to put it another way, what Jung refers to in his discussion of synchronicity is that psyche is the fabric of the universe cohering by association of meanings. The synchronous (present) moment is not a transient moment, but always where one lives, and, is a window onto world as psyche. What that window represents is a first step and the Cabbala is a kind of map for an onward journey. There are others of course, different kinds of maps, and a map is not the journey.

Ann brings to the workshop her exploration of Ted Hughess use of Cabbala, and her experience of the engagement with the different spontaneous energies of its paths. James perspective concerns the potential delight of psychotherapeutic work, that meaning involves engagement with the ground of ones being in the present moment (the apparently ordinary stuff of feelings, body sensations, phantasies, presence of dreams) and, that such presence of being is a dance with someone else.

Anns publications include Ted Hughes: the Poetic Quest (UNE Press, 1994); Poetry and Magic: Birthday Letters and Cabbala http://ann.skea.com; The Ted Hughes Timeline (Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes, Liverpool UP, 2000).

James Barrett is a Jungian Psychotherapist and is currently researching links between the work of Ted Hughes and Carl Jung.