Bernie Neville

(Collins-Dove, 1989)

In Educating Psyche, Bernie Neville, who teaches at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, has integrated the most penetrating and original psychological thinking of the twentieth century into a theory of education. This book is an illuminating journey into the deeper regions of the human mind guided by the work of Jung, Freud, Assagioli, Milton Erickson, J. L. Moreno, Georgi Lozanov, and other pioneering theorists.

The book explores the educational applications of archetypal psychology, psychodrama, neuro-linguistic programming, meditation, autogenic training (ranging from affirmations to biofeedback) and a great deal more. The scope of this book is breathtaking.

For Neville, the ultimate goal of human development is wholeness — integration and balance of the diverse possibilities and energies of which we are constituted. Drawing upon Greek mythology to explore the universal archetypes of human experience, Neville demonstrated that different understandings of education cultivate different avenues of human possibility. He provides a poetic and passionate defense of learner-centered pedagogies, for example, as a counterweight to a largely Promethean system of schooling dominated by technological and economic interests. A major purpose of the book is to call attention to the neglected functions of play, spontaneity, intuition, imagination, nurturing, love, ecstasy, and transcendence -- all of which are essential to a full and meaningful life. Yet he warns that an education completely under the spell of Eros or Dionysus is similarly “single visioned” and would lead to its own distortions of human development.

The early chapters of the book describe various techniques that have grown out of the depth psychologies Neville considers. Short of a complete transformation of educational institutions, the selective use of these techniques may be a powerful way to open new horizons for educators and young people. But Neville goes further and considers the philosophical and cultural ramifications of these deep understandings of the mind: “It may not seem to have much practical application for the ... teacher to envision her pupils as the critical point in the universe where evolution is in process, where matter is evolving into consciousness, where universal mind is emerging, but it certainly gives her activity some significance” (p. 154). Indeed, these psychological inquiries suggest a far deeper and more complex significance to human development than contemporary approaches to schooling even begin to suspect. In this light, education must be conceived as a quest for meaning, integration, and wholeness.

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