Imagine your Imago - Liberating the Imaginal Cells of the Human Psyche - The InnerView with Bill Plotkin

by Peter Moore and Werner Brandt

Bill Plotkin, PHD, has been a psychotherapist, research psychologist, rock musician, river runner, professor of psychology, and mountain-bike racer. As a research psychologist, he studied dreams and nonordinary states of consciousness achieved through meditation, biofeedback, and hypnosis. The founder and president of Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org/), he has guided thousands of people through initiatory passages in nature since 1980. Currently an ecotherapist, depth psychologist, and wilderness guide, he leads a variety of experiential, nature-based individuation programs. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing in the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche and more recently, Nature and the Human Soul.

Editor Peter Moore and Contributing Editor/IT Specialist Werner Brandt interviewed Bill in early May.

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For someone not familiar with your work, and specifically your book, “Nature and the Human Soul”, could you briefly describe the developmental model that forms the basis of this book?

“Briefly” is the challenging part. [laughter] This is a nature-based model of human development. There are eight stages that we are designed, as humans, to progress through. It’s how nature has designed humans to grow. Unfortunately, the model looks quite a bit different than the way most people develop in the western, and westernized societies.

In each stage there are two developmental tasks. And the way we progress through each stage is through having some degree of success with those developmental tasks. We never complete any of the tasks of any stage, but that is how we progress.

One task in each stage is nature-oriented, and the other is culture oriented. In other words, one task is developing our relationship with human culture and the other task is developing our relationship with the more-than-human world. In the western societies, we have neglected, for the most part, the nature-oriented task in each of the stages. By the time we get to the 3rd stage, which is early adolescence, in the western world, most peoples’ development tends to stall, right there in the 3rd stage. And so, we live in an adolescent society.

I believe we do, simply in the sense that most people don’t progress beyond psychological adolescence. And when that happens, the whole culture begins to crumble in terms of its deeper psycho-spiritual infrastructure, that which helps us grow as humans. And so I refer to westernized societies as patho-adolescent.

How’s that for an attempt at a brief overview?