Bridge Work: Essays on Mythology, Literature and Psychology

by Dennis Patrick Slattery, Jennifer Leigh Selig (Foreword)

The twenty chapters in this volume are divided into Formal Essays and Cultural Essays. Both, however, explore in varying degrees the place of consilience between literature, mythology and depth psychology. The essays seek that place of analogy, or correspondence and of accord between the three bridges, the three disciplines mentioned in its subtitle. Together they amplify and extend what might best be called a psycho-poetics of myth, where mythology is understood as the mucilage or glue that holds psyche and poiesis together in one form and shape. The intention in all the essays is to invite the reader into the discussion with his/her personal myth resonating with the ideas and images present and to remember and reimagine one’s own narrative through the corridors of those presented in the volume. Bridge Work then carries two it wishes to span disciplines in order to increase one’s range of awareness and it wishes to create a third thing, the bridge itself, as a medium of and for expressing new insights. The hope is that the reader will come away from these twenty expressions of the relational nature of literature to psychology and mythology with a renewed sense of how interdisciplinary studies can reveal other ways of knowing not afforded the specialist inhabiting one field of thought.

226 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 2015

About the author

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D., is a core faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute who helped shape the development of the Mythological Studies program.

He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 17 books, including four volumes of poetry.

He likes motorcycles and currently resides in Texas with his wife Sandy.