Jungian symbolic education aims to rescue pleasure and emotion in
teaching and learning and recast them as existential activities that are
no longer merely rational and forgettable. It proposes the use of
expressive techniques in the classroom to favor spontaneity and enhance
the physical, emotional, imaginative, and creative participation of
teacher and student. The result is a method of teaching that is lively
and useful, rooted in the pedagogic transference, where consciousness is
formed and social participation is refined. The symbolic method trains
teachers to avoid dissociating the subjective and the objective
dimensions and provides students with the opportunity to learn about the
world with their whole being, by uniting reason, emotion, and creativity
and reveal the pleasure of knowledge.
Jungian symbolic education takes as its model life and life's natural
ways of teaching. Its foundation is Carlos Byington's theory of Jungian
symbolic psychology, which describes archetypal patterns of
consciousness by elaborating symbols coordinated by archetypes. It gives
central emphasis to Jung's theory of the individuation process with
contributions from psychoanalysis, especially from Freud and Melanie
Klein, and from analytical psychology, in particular from Erich Neumann.
It is a systemic theory of education that unites Jean Piaget's
constructivism with depth psychology and positions symbolic
constructivism within the pedagogic transference.
Education from the Heart, with many theoretical and practical
contributions, is recommended not only for teachers and administrators,
but also for parents and for those involved in the widespread and
crucial debate on education.
Carlos Amadeu Botelho Byington, M.D., a psychiatrist and Jungian
analyst, graduated at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich and is a
founding member of the Brazilian Society for Analytical Psychology. He
is the author of numerous books, including Jungian Symbolic Education;
The Development of Personality; Structure of Personality: Persona and
Shadow; Symbolic Dimensions of Personality, as well as many articles
