Dionysus in Exile: On the Repression of the Body and Emotion

The internationally renowned Jungian analyst Lopez-Pedraza diagnoses the psychological illness at the core of modern society—the loss of embodied soulfulness in individual’s lives. In this study of the Greek god Dionysus, he offers insight for a cure. Dismemberment and cannibalism, Prometheus and Titanic nature, mystical experience, the communal aspect of Dionysiac worship, jazz, flamenco, and bullfighting are among the many twists and turns taken in this essay that winds its way through issues of the body and emotion to open hidden doors for psychotherapy and to cast new light on post-modern humanity.
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza was born in Cuba in 1920 and later settled in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1962, he moved to Zurich, where for the next eleven years he studied analytical psychology at the C. G. Jung Institute. He returned to Caracas and opened a private practice. He is a member of the international Association for Analytical Psychology and the author of Cultural Anxiety, Hermes and His Children and Anselm Kiefer: The Psychology of "After the Catastrophe.”