Just Released:
The Power of Stories: Mythodrama: Conflict Management and Group Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents Using Stories
Volume 7 of the Zürich Lecture Series
Often lips are sealed, and delicate topics avoided, when children or adolescents are in a conflict situation or have experienced a trauma. Psychologists, psychotherapist, teachers are challenged and must find alternative ways to connect to the individual or group. Talking alone is not sufficient.
In this book by Allan Guggenbühl—Volume 7 of the Zürich Lecture Series—a therapeutic method and conflict management approach is presented, which is successfully employed in group work with children and adolescents in despair or in a conflict situation. Mythodramas main focus are specially selected stories, which mirror the issues of the respective group, connect to the issues of the group, and serve as an entrance to the imaginal. The book describes how the stories are selected, told, enacted, and linked to the issues and concerns of the group or individual.
Mythodrama is a potent method, based on Jungian psychology, which helps groups to move on, express their emotions, concerns, and get motivated to find solutions. Mythodrama has successfully been applied in groups consisting of traumaticised children or adolescents, violent youth, bullies, victims of aggression, adolescents with identity crises, etc. Mythodrama is also a method which is employed in conflict management in schools. The key elements of Mythodrama are Stories, Play, Imagination, Drama, and Concrete Changes.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Allowing semichaos: The Core of Group Therapy
- Chapter 2 Phase One: Preliminary Work: Staging the Community
- Chapter 3 Phase Two: Fun and Play
- Chapter 4 Phase Three: The Power of Stories
- Chapter 5 Phase Four: Being Carried Away by Fantasies — The Imagination
- Chapter 6 Implementation of Inner Images
- Chapter 7 The Step into Reality: the Transfer
- Epilogue
About the Author
Allan Guggenbühl is a Psychologist & Jungian Psychotherapist in Zürich, Switzerland; Prof emeritus of the University of Education of the State of Zürich; Director of the Institute for Conflict management (IKM AG) in Zürich; and former director of the department for group psychotherapy at the education counselling centre in Bern.
He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and Zürich, Switzerland. He is one the most renowned child and adolescent psychologist of Switzerland and an accomplished book author in the German speaking world.
Guggenbühl gives lectures on a regular basis in China, Japan, and the neighbouring EU-countries of Switzerland. He is an author of numerous articles (NZZ) and has written books on adolescents, wisdom, men, school, group therapy, conflict management, violence, and bullying.
His focus is the well-being of children and adolescents in conflict situations, be it in families, among peers or at school. He developed Mythodrama, an approach in group therapy, which relies on specially selected stories, which enable children and adolescents to be aware of their concerns, voice their problems, and find solutions.
Other Books in the
Zürich Lecture Series
Published by Chiron Publications
Volume 1 – Where Soul Meets Matter: Clinical and Social Applications of Jungian Sandplay Therapy
by Eva Pattis Zoja
Eva Pattis Zoja explores the psyche’s astonishing capacity and determination to regulate itself by creating images and narratives as soon as a free and protected space for expression is provided. A variety of examples from analytic practice with adults and from psychosocial projects with children in vulnerable situations illustrate how sandplay can be used in different therapeutic settings.
Volume 2 – ‘Two Souls Alas’ : Jung’s Two Personalities and the Making Of Analytical Psychology
by Mark Saban
In his memoir, Memories Dreams Reflections, Carl Jung tells us that, as a child, he had the experience of possessing two personalities. ‘Two Souls Alas’ is the first book to suggest that Jung’s experience of the difficult dynamic between these two personalities not only informs basic principles behind the development of Jung’s psychological model but underscores the theory and practice of Analytical Psychology as a whole.
Volume 3 – Reading Goethe at Midlife:
Ancient Wisdom, German Classicism & Jung
by Paul Bishop
Reading Goethe at Midlife reveals the remarkable symmetry between the ideas and Jung and Goethe. Jung’s analysis of the stages of life, and his advice to heed the “call of the self,” are brought into the conjunction with Goethe’s emphasis on the importance of hope, showing an underlying continuity of thought and relevance from ancient wisdom, via German classicism to analytical psychology.
Volume 4 – Creativity:
Patterns of Creative Imagination as Seen Through Art
by Paul Brutsche
We don’t know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air?
This book does not claim to reveal this secret. It does not attempt to reduce creativity to a “nothing but,” for example to explain it as a special ability of certain creative individuals with special abilities. On the contrary, it is about exploring the fullness and variety of this amazing power, which is the basis of all cultural, artistic, scientific and spiritual activity of man, without attributing it to a simple cause.
Volume 5 – A Story of Dreams, Fate and Destiny
by Erel Shalit
In this rich and poetically written book, Erel Shalit “calls attention to the dream and its images along the nocturnal axis that leads us from fate to destiny.” He takes us on a journey from ancient history, beginning with the first documented dream, that of Gilgamesh, to Adam and Eve and the serpent, to Joseph in Egypt as the Pharaoh’s dream interpreter, through ancient Greece to the Asklepion, to Swedenborg’s visions, to our world today through the eyes of Freud, Jung, and science, and finally to the process of active imagination to reveal the workings of Mercurius and the transcendent function.
Volume 6 – At Home In The World:
Sounds and Symmetries of Belonging
by John Hill
This work offers a profound philosophical and psychological exploration of the multi-dimensional significance of home and the interwoven themes of homelessness and homesickness and contemporary global culture. Home is a particular dwelling place, as a cultural or national identity, as a safe temenos in therapy, and as a metaphor for the individuation process are analyzed expertly from multidisciplinary perspectives and, more poignantly, through the sharing of diverse narratives that bear witness to lives lived and endured from memories of homes lost and regained.
Volume 8 – Breaking The Spell Of Disenchantment: Mystery, Meaning, And Metaphysics
In The Work Of C. G. Jung
by Roderick Main
One of the most powerful narratives gripping scientists, intellectuals, and the general culture in Europe during the early decades of the twentieth century was that the world had become disenchanted: stripped of genuine mystery, lacking inherent meaning, and unrelated to any spiritual or divine reality.
In Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment, Roderick Main examines various ways in which C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology, developed during this same period, can be seen to challenge that dominant narrative.
And Coming Soon in the Zürich Lecture Series..
Volume 9
The Lion Will Become Man:
Alchemy and the Dark Spirit in Nature—A Personal Encounter
by Keiron Le Grice
Volume 10
Eternal Echoes: Erich Neumann’s Timeless Relevance
to Consciousness, Creativity, and Evil
by Nancy Swift Furlotti
Download the Chiron Catalog
for a Complete Listing of Titles
