Hermaphrodite as Healing Image:

Connecting a Mythic Imagination to Education

Abstract

This exploration considers the question: What healing and transformation might these image-makers bring to education? Through hermeneutic tracking, a telling of the Greek myth of Hermaphrodite’s birth lays the background. Upon this scene, the alchemical process of psychological development is described wherein a bridge is made to the education and the ways that it might come to be informed through therapeutic practices. Here amplification of the images of Hermes and Aphrodite are traced to revision the ways teachers might embrace apeironic learning through a vibrant relationship to the child – Hermaphrodite, the inner child and the actual child in the classroom – and to move toward a more differentiated and androgynous consciousness. Tact, love, care, freedom, eros and the erotic play, embodiment, joy and ethics are some of the characteristics that appear as curative for education reimagined through mythic imagination.