Learning from the unconscious
pp. 277-290
in: Inna Semetsky (ed), Edusemiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
While human consciousness speaks in verbal language, the unconscious expresses itself in different regimes of signs including pictorial language: the language of images. This chapter addresses a specific theory-practice nexus centered on learning from the unconscious in the process of reading and interpreting the language of Tarot pictures. Combining Jung's archetypal psychology with Deleuze's philosophical method of transcendental empiricism and Husserl's phenomenology, the chapter presents the hermeneutics of Tarot as encompassing multiple lessons embedded in human experiences, situations and events. Tarot assists us in achieving an expanded and intensified scope of awareness that encompasses the level of existential meanings and values while also developing our intuitive abilities so that we learn to read, interpret and understand the language of the unconscious. Tarot edusemiotics relates to what Nel Noddings describes as a feminine or maternal factor: a mother is able to empathically "read' and understand her, even preverbal, children.
