Reverie and the Recovery of the Ancestral Landscape

Bennett, J. (2003). Reverie and the Recovery of the Ancestral Landscape (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003).

The topic of this study is the recovery of the ancestral landscape. In many traditional cultures, remembering one’s ancestors is a ritualized practice which is fully integrated into daily life and embedded in the actual geographical habitat of the tribe or clan. In the United States, the dominant culture was formed primarily through immigration, a phenomenon which disengages individuals from vital connections to land and to traditions. This dissertation explores the meaning of recovering the ancestors within our own cultural milieu.

This dissertation is a depth psychological approach to exploring the recovery of the ancestral landscape. It is a reflective work on the researcher’s personal experience of the ancestral. The method used in this hermeneutic study is heuristic. Much of the text used is a transcription of the sensory and affectual experience of the presence of the ancestral archetype. This study depends upon the concept of the imaginal as a way to gain access to the collective ancestral. Memories of family, reveries, and imaginal stories are treated as texts. Because psychological literature yielded very little applicable to the imaginal ancestral, these texts are interpreted using an eclectic collection of materials that include philosophy, mythology, sociology, physics and the physical sciences, poetry, and fiction.

This study finds that the ancestors have not left us. It finds that personal signs and symbols of ethnic identity—language, traditions, values and activities—form both a physical and a more subtle landscape that evokes and invites the presence of the ancestors. The study argues that daily ritual, habits, and the life of the senses invite reveries that evoke the ancestral archetype on both the personal and collective level.