BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

perceptual stimuli of a locale or space but rather through the elevation of the
imaginal experience of it. I t is then that the place-elsewhere-place archetype
reveals itself in dreams, MLC and SC, although not limited to these, and affirms that
it has always been and will always be a primary existential element.
The de-centred self within each of us (examined in Chapter 4.4) is intimately
and ceaselessly connected with this essential place continuum and is particularly
discernible in an examination of adult narratives of remembered childhood places, in
the biographical narratives of the aged and of those who have experienced trauma,
exile or homelessness. These reveal how we become oblivious to the movement of
the self and time, and experience a kind of participation mystique consciousness
that permeates the natural world that our ancestors experienced prior to the break-
up of the bi-cameral mind. MLC closely replicates this state of mind for it reminds
us that the world of place-elsewhere-place is a sovereign domain, and that our
proclivity for Gnostic-like melancholy is an ineluctable part of living in the physical
world. Often the mundane narratives of the world and certainly the imaginal
mythopoeic narratives of the soul constellate the place-elsewhere-place continuum
in a numinous ‘I -Thou’ manner; the primordial archaic soul is revealed in a hieros
gamos with the ineffable realm of place.
We commonly use the word place as a noun to describe locale, physical
environment; a particular part of a surface or body, social, familial or professional
position or as a signifier of prestige, a step in a sequence, an appropriate moment
or point, but in its mythopoeic dimension we can see it for what it truly is; an
artefact of the psyche. The place-elsewhere-place continuum is archaic and yet
immediate, insistent and commanding, elusive, dichotomous and, I suspect, the
most profound structuring principle of the human psyche. Today it is through this
place-elsewhere-place continuum that the dominant ego not only discovers its
separateness and identity but also its solitude and uniqueness, its aloneness, as
distinct from that original and archaic condition of participation mystique and in this
new solitude, its imaginal imperative, embodied in the Platonic myth, of
reunification.
At this point we must consider again the words of Pato Dooley for they
reveal not only the imperative of a soul striving to reconcile itself to the nature of
place, but also allow the development of a provisional definition of place: place is
the existential measure, physically, psychologically, emotionally, imaginally and
spiritually of being, of existence and of both individual and collective identity. Both