Mary Watkins - Individuation, Ancestral Reckoning, and Ecopsychosocial Repair

Psychosocial Wednesdays with Mary Watkins
12. October 2022
Individuation, Ancestral Reckoning, and Ecopsychosocial Repair
As we continue to redress the effects of individualism on our psychological theorizing and practice, bending toward more interdependent understandings, both past ancestors and new generations enter our horizons with gathered force. If we include the work of reckoning with the debts of our ancestors as part of individuation, what might this process look like? From my own engagement with this effort and from witnessing the experiences of others, I offer a map of the tasks associated with the return of stolen and excess assets, resources, power, and privilege by white people in the United States to the commons. I hope there will be analogies and divergences that can be brought forward in our discussion with regard to participants’ own countries of origin.
Mary Watkins, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she co-founded the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program and its Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies Specialization. She is the author of Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, as well as Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. She is co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Talking with Young Children About Adoption, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, and a co-editor of "Psychology and the Promotion of Peace" (Journal of Social Issues, 44, 2). She studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich and was a member of the early archetypal psychology group. She has taught and developed liberation psychology for the past three decades.
The right of Mary Watkins, Paul Attinello, Stefano Carpani and Bernhard von Guretzky to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright.