Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Review of <em>The earth has a soul: C. G. Jung on nature, technology and modern life</em>.

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Reviews the book, The Earth Has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life by Meredith Sabini (2016). Drawing on relevant parts of Jung's collected work, Sabini's book provides a map of how our wounded and dissociated relationship with nature could potentially be healed. She has also contributed to the fields of ecopsychology and evolutionary psychology and has founded "The Dream Institute." Sabini aims to promote an understanding of nature in its full spectrum, encompassing both spirit and matter, and the acknowledgment of nature's divinity. Including her experience of Jung as a healer for her wounded relationship with nature, Sabini wishes that the book impact her readers in ways that heal their relationship with nature. Therefore, in an imaginative interview with Jung, she asks: how did our loss of connection with nature come about–and was it ever any different? What are the consequences of this loss? Have we really "conquered Nature"? How might this rupture be healed? In the nine chapters of this book, Sabini gives Jung's voice the primary place, presenting condensed answers from Jung's original writings interwoven with her reflections and interpretations. Sabini outlines Jung's understanding of how our dissociation from nature came about. Viewing culture as a living entity, Jung imagined contemporary culture and our dissociation from nature as a cultural neurosis. Jung's main diagnosis of modern life was that most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old wisdom stored up in us. Sabini advocates Jung's cultural diagnosis as more relevant today than ever. Maxwell (2003) suggests a necessary civilizing of our barbaric self. Healing the fragmentation that is at the root of the current world crisis requires an integrated epistemology, a "deep science" (Maxwell, 2003) that integrates both the rational knowledge of scientific empiricism and intuitive knowing of spiritual experience–what Anderson (2014) termed sacred science. All is seen as sacred as an Iâ€"thou relationship instead of an Iâ€"it relationship. Here we enter the eye of the needle. It requires heroic action on all our parts–individually, collectively, and globally. In the fierce urgency of today's environmental crises, if a genuine planetary wisdom-culture fully emerges, becomes stable, and takes radical responsibility for transformation and social change for the restoration of the wholeness of the Earth in harmony with humanity, then the turning of the wheel may become the great participatory planetary transition (Korten, 2007; Macy, 2007; Raskin, 2016). May we civilize our barbaric self by remedying our lost connection with nature to create, all together, a life-honoring civilization on Earth. In this context, Sabini's book is an important contribution, an epiphany, a doorway helping to restore our relationship with nature and to reintegrating our archaic mind into our soul as a spiritual task. Such a book is relevant to all humanity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)