Healing Symbols in Psychotherapy

Existential Transformational Game Design: Harnessing the “Psychomagic” of Symbolic Enactment

“…But how can indexical symbolic enactment contribute to personal transformation directly? Goodwyn (2016) , referring to Kradin, explains that psychosomatic symptoms are a failure of symbol formation:…”

“…Therefore, “[t]he history of medical treatment is basically the history of the placebo effect” ( Shapiro and Shapiro, 1999 , p. 13), but this does not mean such effects are the equivalent of “no therapy” ( Koshi and Short, 2007 , p. 13). Rather, placebo describes the psychobiological phenomenon where the body and brain anticipate and participate in clinical improvement, and placebo responses have been observed in a variety of mental and physical disorders (see a thoroughly referenced account of these studies in Goodwyn, 2016 , p. 28).…”

“… Goodwyn (2016) explains that the key to the “magic” of its effectiveness lies in the mind-body connection. Referring to biogenetic structuralist Charles Laughlin, Goodwyn writes:…”

“…Yet it is mostly ritual and theater that have embraced and leveraged indexical symbolism for personal transformation and growth. There is significant research on the use of ritual in psychotherapy ( Parker and Horton, 1996 ; Kirmayer, 1999 ; Goodwyn, 2016 ). Alejandro Jodorowski’s “psychomagic” poetic acts have become famous as a form of theater counseling that is based on symbolic action ( Jodorowski, 2010 , 2015 ).…”

Comments on the 2018 IAAP Conference on Archetype Theory: defending a non‐reductive biological approach

“…Thus, we could reword my definition that Merchant cites: we could say the archetype is the collection of processes by which a convergent symbol and/or narrative is produced, and it consists of universal and reliably emergent (i.e. inherited, inborn) constraints and biases that include but are not limited to image schemas, basic functional regularities, universal regularities in the environment, universal human emotional systems, the various universal cognitive and physiological tendencies reviewed in Goodwyn (, , ), and still others likely yet to be discovered. I feel this definition is true to Jung’s late, essentially dispositional definition of the archetype as ‘an inherited tendency of the human mind to form … representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern’ (1961, para.…”