ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2007 Issue 4

Dr. Joseph Henderson, the dean of American Jungian analysts for the past 50 years, died at the age of 104 on November 17th after a brief illness. Henderson was the last living link to a generation who sought analysis with C.G. Jung in Zürich between 1920 and the beginning of World War II in 1939 and who later became analysts themselves.

Joseph Lewis Henderson was born in Elko, Nevada on August 31, 1903 of a prominent Nevada family which was active in politics and business in the late 19th and early 20th century. His uncle, Charles Henderson, was Under Secretary of the Navy under FDR during World War I and later became a U.S. Senator from the state of Nevada. Henderson went east to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey where his tutor was Thornton Wilder. He graduated from Princeton in 1927 with a Bachelor of Arts in French literature. Following graduation he returned to San Francisco where he became a drama critic and book reviewer for two small magazines.
 
In 1929 he traveled to Zürich for a year of analysis with C.G. Jung, and he was a participant in Jung's "Dream Seminar" published by Princeton University press in 1984. He entered medical school at St. Bartholomew's in London, graduating in 1938. During breaks in his studies he returned for further analysis with Jung.
 
In 1938 he returned to New York to open a practice of Jungian analysis. In 1940, eager to return to the West Coast, he and his wife, Helena Darwin Cornford, and their daughter Elizabeth, moved to San Francisco where he was a co-founder of the first professional Jungian group in the West. During World War II, he worked at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco along with fellow co-founder Jo Wheelwright evaluating returning military personnel from the South Pacific. He taught at the old Presbyterian Medical Center, the former home of Stanford Medical School, as a regular faculty member until the medical school moved to its new home on the Stanford campus in 1959.
 
As co-founder of the Jung Institute in San Francisco, he was twice its past president, and he has been influential in the professional development of many subsequent Jungian analysts in their various endeavors. He also was instrumental in the San Francisco Institute acquiring a large collection of images with their psychological commentary, which became the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, otherwise known as ARAS. When ARAS evolved into a national organization he served on the board for many years, and at the time of his death he was a lifetime honorary member.
 
He traveled frequently to both England and Switzerland where, after World War II, he continued to see Jung and other colleagues. He was elected Vice President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology in 1962 and served only one term, finding that he preferred writing to political activity.
 
His writings include the following books: The Wisdom of the Serpent, co-written with Maude Oakes in 1963, a chapter entitled Ancient Myths and Modern Man in Man and His Symbols, edited by Jung, 1964, Thresholds of Initiation, 1967, reprinted in 2005, Cultural Attitudes in Psychological Perspective, 1983, a compilation of essays entitled Shadow and Self, 1990, and Transformation of the Psyche, 2003, co-authored with Dyane Sherwood. He has written numerous papers on such diverse subjects as anthropology with special reference to the American Indian, relations between East and West, clinical issues related to transference/counter-transference, aspects of dream interpretation, the use of art in psychotherapy, and alchemical symbolism in analysis. Dr. Henderson developed the concept of the "cultural unconscious", which he introduced in an address at the 2nd International Jungian Congress in Zürich in 1962. This idea has evolved into the hypothesis of the "cultural complex" which has received much attention lately in the Jungian world. In addition, he has written numerous movie and book reviews.
 
He practiced and taught Jungian analysis and analytical psychology from 1938 until his retirement in 2005. He has been a source of inspiration and professional wisdom for many generations of Jungian analysts, and his practice has included significant individuals from many other fields of endeavor.
 
His wife, Helena, died in 1994, and his daughter, Elizabeth, died in 2001. He is survived by two grandchildren Julia Eisenmann and her husband Andy Behman, and Nick Eisenmann and his wife Elizabeth Wolf and two great-grandchildren.

As the year is coming to an end, we are sending you a newly written entry on The World Tree. In religious imagination the world over, the natural tree has become an image of the world, where the crown touching the sky and the roots reaching into the earth are connected through the trunk, suggesting the union of above and below, heaven and earth, temporal and eternal. At this time, the image of the tree in the form of the Menorah and Christmas tree is lighting up the darkness around us. The burning oil lamps and the candles bring the same promise - that the light will return. This is how another entry in the Archive describes it:

"The menorah combines two primordial images that are normally antagonistic to each other: a growing thing (tree or bush) and a burning thing (fire, sun, etc.). With the fusion of these two, a symbol expressive of the spiritual as coming both from above (heaven) and below (earth) is formed. Similar to the menorah is the traditional Christmas tree, which combines the two same elements: the living tree holding up burning candles. Associated since medieval times with the winter solstice, the menorah and the Christmas tree serve as reminders of the life and the light that have disappeared from the earth during the long dark days of deepest winter." (For the complete text, see ARAS record 6Rb.205).

From its tangle of roots burrowing into the secrets of the earth to its topmost leaves that sparkle with the stars, the World Tree upholds the universe. A dynamic bridge between above and below, its massive trunk, spine of the middleworld, connects and supports all life: creatures of the underworld creep and tunnel within its limitless root web; while birds make music in the airy freedom of its upperworld branches. In between, many animals - including human beings - are sustained by its manifold gifts of flowers, leaves, fruit, nuts and sheltering branches. The World Tree is both axis mundi and a living reservoir of life. It speaks to us equally of stability and motion: the perfect order and harmony of the cosmos, and the ceaseless activity of life as it pours forth its creative abundance.

One of the most complex descriptions of the World Tree comes to us from Scandinavian mythology. At the center of the world grows Yggdrasil, a gigantic evergreen ash or yew, so huge that its branches stretch over heaven and earth alike. One of its three great roots reaches down into the realm where the frost-giants dwell. Here lies Mimir's Well which contains the waters of wisdom and memory. Another root goes into the realm of the dead, while beneath the third is Asgard, the abode of the gods. (Orchard, 185) Close by live the Norns, three sisters who spin the web of destiny and water the tree from the sacred spring of Urd. But even as it grows and flourishes, Yggdrasil is constantly under attack from goats and harts that graze from its shoots, and especially from the cosmic serpent, Nidhogg, who along with scores of smaller snakes, gnaws at its roots. An eagle who lives on the topmost bough battles the snake every day, while the squirrel, Ratatosk, runs up and down carrying insults from one to the other (Davidson, 26). We are made aware of the precarious balance of life, as eagle and serpent, archetypal creatures of heaven and earth, light and darkness, act out the ever-shifting battle for power in our world of opposites.
 
'Yggdrasil' is thought to mean 'the horse of Ygg' or Odin, the god who sacrificed himself on the tree in order to gain wisdom from Mimir's Well. Odin's ordeal parallels the ritual ascents of the World Tree for initiation and healing found in northern shamanism. The shaman, in ecstatic trance, climbs the tree (usually a birch), rising through many planes of existence to the world of the gods in order to bring back divine wisdom. (Eliade, 119)
 
The World Tree shows the way beyond our often limited conception of self, connecting us with both heaven and earth. Like twisting roots, our dreams penetrate the soil of the soul and nourish the creative force within, so that it rises out of hidden depths to grow straight and strong like the trunk of a tree. Our thoughts, restless as leaves on wind-blown branches, turn towards the light of the sun to transform its vital energy into the green fire of vision.
 

Davidson H.R. Ellis. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe London, 1964.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism, Princeton, 1974.
Orchard, Andy. Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend London, 1997.