Steven M. Cohn

Learning from Tarzan
Steven M. Cohn

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Steven Cohn is a doctoral student in ecopsychology at the Pacifica Institute in Carpenteria California, near Santa Barbara. He has completed a dissertation titled The Destruction of the Forest and its Impact on Soul as Informed by Indigenous Peoples. In this essay, he tells how he awoke to the mysteries of the rainforest in the most unlikely of places: at Saturday matinees in a Newton Iowa movie house. Like many of us in the urban industrial societies, he first discovered the primitive in the romanticized imagery of our popular culture -- in this case Hollywood's Tarzan. He has since gone on to travel the rainforests of the world, where he has studied the surviving forest people under the increasingly lethal pressure of global industrialism. His dissertation was largely inspired by a remarkable visionary moment that may have brought him closer to the indigenous experience of nature than any of his travels.

I SPENT MY boyhood exploring the woods near my Iowa home. With only my dog as a companion, I wandered for hours along a twisting path that ran beside a gentle, rock-filled creek. Tree I got to know the trees and stones, the animals and insects, the colors of the seasons, the filtered bright of day, and the sometimes frightening totality of forest night.

All the while I was walking through the real forests of Iowa, I was moving through the imaginal jungles of Africa. Visions from Tarzan movies danced through my preadolescent head. For me, Hollywood's famous Ape-man was the verdant warrior of the jungle, a soulful, archetypal hero fighting against the senseless encroachment of civilization into the homes and psyches of nature-based peoples and their animal friends. Thanks to the Tarzan I met during Saturday matinees at the Capital Theater in downtown Newton, I came to recognize other ways of living in the world, other ways of knowing and seeing. I also discovered a personal and natural freedom: the freedom not to be civilized and cultivated, the freedom both to act on and trust in my instincts, freedom to both admit and express the mammal in me, above all, freedom to live poetically with the natural grace of the fecund land.

Those Saturday afternoon matinees gave me, a mid-western boy, the chance to walk with Tarzan's bare, jungle-toughened feet. This imaginary life taught me that, although the forest had frighteningly hostile predators, it was also a nourishing habitat that provided food, shelter, and a succulent landscape, as well as the companionship of trustworthy animals and tribal friends. I developed a thrilling image of life in the rainforest: Tarzan- DC Comix long-legged birds, bizarre and noisy insects, weird trees draped in mosses and vines, and dark-skinned peoples who adorned themselves in the hides and feathers of mythic creatures and painted their faces with colorful roots. These expressions of life were deliciously foreign to me, each of them so romantically different from anything I had experienced in the monotony of Iowa's corn and soybean field countryside.

For me, the seemingly infinite variety of life was the most fascinating feature of the lush, rainforest landscape. The animals, plants, people, insects, and birds were deliciously foreign to me. Although during my youth I was more of an explorer and day dreamer than a reader, school librarians did not have to push me to read adventure books featuring settings in exotic lands. At the age of 17, my love of both nature and endless exploration led me to fulfill a youthful life's dream: a journey across East Africa. While on safari in Kenya and Tanzania, I traveled through a rainforest and visited a Masai village. The Masai were the first non-North American indigenous peoples I had met, and I savored the warm sense of community I felt in their presence. The African tribe members appeared to be completely comfortable in their sometimes hostile, yet verdantly-enchanted environment.

My early experiences in the forests of both Iowa and Africa taught me a deep respect for nature and for people who live in close contact with the Earth. Since becoming an adult I have traveled to other forests, and lived with other forest peoples in Mask Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The fertile terrain of the forest and has made an indelible impact on me. The indigenous peoples who call the forest their home (literally or philosophically) have earned my greatest respect.

Although I have long appreciated indigenous peoples from many different cultures, it was not until I read Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that I began to see the world through indigenous eyes. Although Brown's book was about the massacre and displacement of Native Americans, in many ways it told a universal story of our collective psychological misunderstanding, cruel mistreatment, and blatant disrespect for peoples who live in close contact with nature; and, therein, misunderstanding, mistreatment, and disrespect for nature itself. Finding a connection between psychology, deforestation, and the eradication of indigenous peoples is, of course, nothing new. More than one hundred years before Brown's book was published, in the year of Freud's birth, a journalist reporting for an article in Harpers New Monthly Magazine in 1856 wrote,"To cut down trees and shoot Indians seems to be our national instinct."

Among the main reasons I decided to write a dissertation about forest destruction, soul, and indigenous peoples is a vision that came to me one afternoon in August 1993 at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. I am not given easily to the use of the word vision, but know of no other word to accurately describe my experience. Drugs were not a part of my experience; and therefore, my vision was not substance-induced.

Here is what happened.

I was enrolled in a Dream Workshop at Pacifica Graduate Institute. One day we were assigned to spend the afternoon on an individual walkabout. Almost as soon as I began the walkabout, I dropped into a dream-like state in which reality seemed to tilt on its axis. After a few minutes of being led down Lambert Road by suggestive invitations from various animals and insects, I found myself searching for a noisy woodpecker.

On seeing the red-headed bird, I received a message telling me to look deeper for my "food," to pierce the bark in order to "eat." Suddenly, from out of nowhere came a friendly, black dog, limping on a lame foot. I too was limping due to a hip and knee injury from a previous week's exercise class. The dog started walking east on Lambert Road and I sensed he wanted me to follow him. I had the feeling there was something he was going to show me, that he was going to be my guide.

After we walked for a few moments the dog strode in front of me and blocked my path. He wrapped his black, furry body around the front of my legs and stopped me from moving forward by leaning his weight into me. I took this as a sign that I was to look around. I looked up and saw the top of a beautiful, sun-lit mountain and felt a great sense of lightness and well-being. In that instant, at the moment I felt emotionally lighter, the dog yielded, allowing me to proceed. Having connected with the mountain I found myself sinking into the environment, my intuition sharpened. I continued to follow the dog.

Without warning, the dog cut in front of me again and pushed his body against my legs. Once more I was unable to walk forward. As I looked up I saw a metal, cyclone fence with a red and white sign on it that read "No Trespassing." Behind the fence and the sign sat a handsome grove of oak trees. As I focused on the sign I tried to understand the message that I sensed the black, limping dog was facilitating. A thought came to me: Perhaps I am not suppose to study the forest. In the next instant, my vision was drawn past the No Trespassing sign and my senses focused on one of the oak trees. Simultaneously, I was transformed into another being. I was no longer myself, not even the dream-like, animated self that I had dropped into at the beginning of the walkabout. I was an indigenous man, and I felt my reflection in the oak tree. Looking at the tree through the metal fence, past the "No Trespassing" sign, I had a feeling of being cut off from a member of my family or, perhaps, a part of my self. I felt a deep, painful loss; but, on reflection, it was not my pain (not in a way that I could consciously recognize). It was the pain of a primitive man who had just been bitten by a poisonous notice suspended in the metal weaving of a cyclone fence as if it was a deadly spider biting from the center of a web.

As the dog continued to lean against my legs, I was drawn to look west, down Lambert Road toward the ocean. I was then overcome by a vivid and more intense vision. As I looked toward the ocean, all of the buildings between where I stood and the horizon sank into the Earth and at the same time vaporized into smoke. Where the buildings had been now stood an expansive oak forest, sweeping across the landscape as far as I could see. I was awed by a calm sacredness. In the next instant the black, limping dog moved his weight from against my legs. He slipped into some brush by the side of the road and disappeared up a long, gently-curving drive.

Some psychologists believe that visions are born out of an abaissement du niveau mental." The dream-like state I was in during my walkabout apparently reflected just such a level of psychic relaxation. In turn, that psychic relaxation both permitted the eruption of unconscious contents into my consciousness and faciliated my vision. Jung believed that a vision is a symbol consisting not Border only of archetypal forms of thought but of instinctual elements as well, so that it can justly lay claim to being a reality. It is not only historical, but topical and dynamic. Hence, it does not appeal only to conscious technological fantasies, or to philosophical speculations, but strikes deep down into what Jung would have called one's animal nature.

Jung believed that reduced intensity of consciousness and absence of concentration and attention (Janet's abaissement du niveau mental) correspond pretty exactly to the primitive state of consciousness in which, we must suppose, myths were originally formed. My vision incorporated both the "animal nature" and "primitive state of consciousness" that Jung addressed. I was (as in Jung's notion of "claiming a reality") transported into the skin of an indigenous man while gazing at an oak tree that was trapped behind a metal, cyclone fence.

According to William Anderson, author of The Green Man, when an affection for a particular plant or tree is aroused in us we are linked through an emotional bond, more subtle and immediate than the effect of scent, to the greater world of vegetation of which the plant or tree is a part. It is a deep, wise world, one to which we can only respond because we possess it in our own natures and in the instinctive symbolism of the soul.

Over the past thirty years I have been sickened and deeply disturbed by our collective devastation of the natural environment and by our assault on the forests and the beings, human and otherwise, who call the forests their home. During my lifetime, we have seen a disturbing, titanic increase in the rate of destruction of our forests and the vast displacement (and killing) of both indigenous peoples and animals.

In response to both our degraded environment and to the dislocation and massacre of indigenous peoples, many disciplines have begun to include ecology as part of their world view. But as recently as 1991, psychology did not address issues related to ecological destruction. Sad to say, as Ralph Metzner, President of the Green Earth Foundation, has observed, the one discipline that has remained virtually untouched by any concern for the environment or the human-to-nature relationship is psychology. You will search in vain in the texts and journals of any of the major schools of psychology for any theory or research concerning the most basic fact of human existence: the fact of our relationship to the natural world of which we are a part.

I happened to read Theodore Roszak's The Voice of the Earth while camping in a forested area under attack by loggers. In Roszak's work, I found a contemporary version and vision of Earth-based psychology: an ecopsychology that seeks to unify ecology, psychology, and spirituality. Ecopsychologists hope that by reawakening ecological and spiritual consciousness, humans may act instinctively to care for the Earth and all of the life it supports.

I hope my dissertation will contribute, in some small way, to the facilitation of the tasks that are important within the field of ecopsychology.

First, ecologizing psychology: To contribute to an awareness that the needs of the planet are the needs of the person; and, that psychology can serve as a vehicle to awaken the human bond with the earth by developing practicable and theoretical instruments for rekindling ecological and spiritual consciousness.

Second, psychologizing ecology: To examine the psychological roots of ecological degradation and to encourage human fulfillment through forms that do not promote excessive, destructive material consumption.

Third, politicizing ecopsychology: To promote ecopsychological issues and practices in social, spiritual, political, and institutional arenas; and, to contribute to an environmental agenda that addresses the causes (in addition to the symptoms) of ecological destruction.

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