reflection on the mythopoetic authorial process. And indeed, as we each
anticipated, it provided deeper and richer responses overall.
The shamans were Maureen Roberts, a practicing psychotherapist, university
lecturer and PhD from South Australia and Rebbe Yonassan Gershom, Director of
the Jewish Fellowship in Minneapolis, USA, both of whom have publicly declared
themselves as shamans.
I believed that the research also needed to incorporate a less structured
aspect to act not only as a verification tool and comparative measure but to
facilitate the serendipitous. This was achieved by selecting specific questions or
themes from the research questionnaire and informally discussing them with
qualified individuals such as Dr. Leonard Schlain, a published American physician
whose interests and research compliment those pursued in this thesis. Some
responses were also received from individuals who were found from within the
membership of Jung Circle, an internet chat site that facilitates online discussion of
Jungian and related topics. I n posting the questions to that forum the fundamental
criterion stipulated was that any respondent had to be enthusiastic readers of
serious fiction, familiar with various literary genres, styles and authors. The meagre
numbers of responses received were, although general and submitted under
pseudonyms, later found to reinforce or confirm the more specific responses of the
research group. Finally, I interrogated a wide range of mythopoeic literature. I have
integrated the invaluable findings from this unstructured research into the
subsequent sections of the thesis.
3.4 The Questionnaire
I designed a questionnaire covering four broad but relevant areas, randomly
ordered and sometimes repeated in disguised form throughout twenty-two
questions, somewhat in the manner of the Kiersey Temperament Test where
repetition acts to confirm specific tendencies. There are focus questions (question
numbers 1, 2, and 5) that were intended to elicit a direct response whilst at the
same time focusing the respondent’s attention on the questionnaire task. The next
are personality type questions (question numbers 3, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11) intended to
identify a phantasy-receptive-type personality because I wanted to investigate
whether phantasy proneness, particularly in childhood, increases the likelihood of
MLC experiences and potential in both the adult reader and mythopoeic writer,