Living a "Symbolic Life" - Great Salt Lake as Symbol: Friday Lecture

Great Salt Lake has become a symbol. If we let them, our lives become the symbolic lives Jung believed we are “badly in need” of.We are excited to welcome Brooke Williams back this season!"You see, man is in need of a symbolic life—badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary rational, or irrational things...but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere, except where we participate in the ritual of life..."~Carl Jung"Love the Lake" lawn signs across Salt Lake Valley. Billboards along the freeway. Everyday something new in the news about Great Salt Lake. The politicians, most of them developers, tiptoeing around the issue, knowing deep beneath the sludge of their own wealth that We The People don't want Her, Great Salt Lake, to dry up. We don't want and literally can't live with the toxic dust blowing regularly across Salt Lake Valley. We can't condone the disruption of massive wild bird migrations.If Great Salt Lake symbolizes our psyche, originally, the conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche mixed more freely with each other. Modernity created a hard division between them, as the berm which separates the North Arm from the South Arm; suddenly Great Salt Lake broke from its physical bonds in ordinary reality and became a metaphor.We still have access to our unconscious, our own balancing, 'adjustable berm.' Many believe, like Freud, that this north, wild, unconscious psychic side threatens society, and sealing it off may be what's best. The North Arm, like our unconscious (both darker, murkier, and still wild) needs to live as though our survival depends on it, because it does.1.5 CEUs available for mental health professionals.