ABSTRACT
Another indigenous story, this one Native American, provides a more detailed picture of how the skillful use of comprehension modes can solve dangerous conflicts. The story also presents a wonderful image for unconscious chronic interpersonal conflicts – “sleep fighting,” i.e., brothers arguing and hitting each other while asleep. (This dynamic explains much of today’s seemingly insoluble conflicts.) What resolves the problem is a specific sequence of comprehension modes, namely the “reforging sequence,” visible in successful psychotherapy. It involves a descent from everyday understanding to less accessible comprehension modes arriving at mythic experience which inspires and shapes the transformation. This is the process of katabasis and anabasis described in the Eleusinian mysteries and Jung’s metaphorical interpretation of medieval European alchemy.
