Faye Pye Grass Roots Seminars

Term 1 (2024)	Date	Subject	Speaker
1	September 25th	Jung the Man	George Bright	Book Now
2	October 2nd	The Structure of the Psyche	Jim Fitzgerald	Book Now
3	October 9th	Persona	Penny Boisset	Book Now
4	October 16th	Complexes	Edward Bloomfield	Book Now
5	October 23rd	Projection	Gill Kind	Book Now
6	October 30th	Archetypes	Tommaso Priviero	Book Now
7	November 6th	Ego and Self	Max Noak	Book Now
8	November 13th	Animus and Anima	Dariane Pictet	Book Now
9	November 20th	Shadow	Maxim Ilyashenko	Book Now

Term 2 (2025)	Date	Subject	Speaker
1	January 8th	Typology	Katerina Sarafidou	Book Now
2	January 15th	Art, Image and Symbol	Irene Cioffi Whitfield	Book Now
3	January 22nd	Myth and Fairytales	Heather Angel	Book Now
4	January 29th	Synchronicity	Roderick Main	Book Now
5	February 5th	Active Imagination	ffiona von westhoven Perigrinor	Book Now
6	February 12th	The Interpretation of Dreams	Laura Martin	Book Now
7	February 19th	Jung and Religion	Stephen Bushell	Book Now
8	February 26th	Alchemy	Dale Mathers	Book Now
9	March 5th	Individuation	Robert Mercurio	Book Now

	Title	Author
1	Memories, Dreams, Reflections (trans Richard and Clara Winston, first published 1963)	C.G. Jung with Aniela Jaffé
2	Man and His Symbols (first published 1964)	C.G. Jung (ed.)
3	'Introduction - Liber Novus: The "Red Book of C. G. Jung", in: The Red Book - Liber Novus.: A Reader's Edition (New York: W W Norton 2012)	Sonu Shamdasani
4	C. G. Jung: a Biography in Books (New York: WW Norton 2011)	Sonu Shamdasani
5	Jung, His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir (Ashville, North Carolina: Chiron 2018)	Barbara Hannah
6	The Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung (ed) The Art of C. G. Jung (New York: W W Norton 2018)
7	A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (London & New York: Routledge 2013)	Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter and Fred Plaut (ed)
8	A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Boston & London: Shambhala 1999)	Robert H Hopcke
9	Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice. (Toronto: Inner City Books 1983)	James A. Hall

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About Faye Pye

Faye Pye: Preparing the Ground

But are they dead? Are those books not the distant echo of life once lived, of minds and hearts quick with passions, hopes, and visions, as keen as our own? Does it matter so much whether the pages before us tell the story of a patient still alive, or dead for fifty years? Jung (1968, p.538, ¶ 1266)

I am always struck by how easily the contributions of our ancestors, both positive and negative, fall from collective consciousness as we become consumed by the fascinations of the present day. As the current co-ordinator of the Grass Roots programme, I felt there was a danger of losing this connection to our past. It was Faye Pye, former chairman of the Analytical Psychology Club, that evolved into the C. G. Jung Club we know today, who in 1973 introduced the Club's enduring annual Grass Roots seminars covering the fundamental core concepts of analytical psychology. Having recently passed through the Club's centenary year and with Jung's 150th birthday just around the corner the time has come to excavate the ground of Grass Roots and revivify the mind and heart of Faye Pye.

In her opening address to the 1979 edition of Harvest, Faye Pye wrote, "The Grass Roots Seminars I and II specifically teach Jung's basic principles of the structure and dynamics of the psyche, and its cultural manifestations" (Pye, 1979).

In this article, I hope it will also be seen that Faye's implementation of Grass Roots, through its very language, expressed an intent to prepare the ground, lay the foundations and to cultivate stability and upward growth for those that attended and engaged with the programme. I propose also that this intent grew directly from Faye's own weltanschauung, her experiences and her very nature as an analyst and human being.

Faye was born on the 25th of November 1913, in Medway, Kent to Godfrey Orde and Elizabeth van Zwanenberg. She had an older brother, Anthony. Little is known about Faye's early life but it is believed that her father served both as a navy captain and army lieutenant and was also a historian. It is likely that her mother was from a Dutch family which might explain how she was able to work as an analyst with the Afrikaner population during time she spent in South Africa.

Faye read English at Cambridge and went on to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. After Faye's death her friend, Ruth M. Haslam (1980) recollected their early meeting as fellow medical students and dissecting partners evacuated together to Aberdeen as war broke out. Throughout their friendship they remained interested by the differences between them, Ruth being a sensate type and Faye very much an intuitive. Intuition of course, had been of little use for the practicality required for dissecting bodies.

After qualifying as a doctor in 1944, Faye became a practicing registrar at St John's Hospital in Stone, which was then the county asylum of Buckinghamshire, an imposing Victorian building that was demolished in the 1990s. Faye was in her early thirties, when she met H G Baynes and began an analysis with him, intending that she would eventually train as an analyst. According to Joan Reggiori (1980), Faye knew even before she undertook medical training that she wanted to be an analyst, but first she was determined to qualify as a psychiatrist. An indication perhaps, of her thoroughness and determination.

Once World War II was over Faye travelled to Zurich as one of the earliest students at the C. G. Jung Institute where she met Jung and analysed with Toni Wolff. She was in the same group as Vera von der Heydt, they attended the same lectures and had the same seminar leaders. In writing her obituary von der Heydt said that Faye "was quiet and reserved, but always friendly, and one could rely on her to ask questions or make some pertinent remarks whenever things got a bit sticky in a seminar" (von der Heydt, 1980).

Once her status as an analyst was conferred by Jung, she joined the Society of Analytical Psychology and returned initially to London until moving to Durban in 1947. She had married Philip Pye, her first husband in 1944, and one surmises that this move to South Africa where she remained until her return to London in the early 1960's was in some way related to the demands of marriage.

Vera von der Heydt noted that Faye established a successful analytic practice, working with African, Afrikaner and English speaking analysands and published a number of papers about her clinical experiences. As I read some of these articles Faye's ability to penetrate the heart of the matter was evident and there was a sense of her undeniable worth as an analyst. In an early paper (Pye, 1952) she discussed the value of depth psychology in the treatment of psychosomatic illness illustrated through the clinical cases of two young women. Her clear message was that psyche and soma are separated at their peril.

In Some Analytical Problems Encountered in South Africa (Pye, 1957) Faye highlighted the 'immense, uneasy complexity' of the South African social pattern and what this meant for the stability of the developing ego. South Africa represented a variable for Faye, which contrasted perhaps with what she had learnt in Zurich and the prevailing literature where the assumption was that 'the environment is relatively stable and satisfactory, and that the difficulties experienced in it by the individual are the result of intra-psychic projections'. The absence of organic community, widely differing cultural patterns, social conflict and 'the tension which the ego experiences between the differentiated and primitive levels of the psyche is stimulated and intensified by the immense unbridged gap between Western civilization and primitive culture'.

Again, this paper is illustrated with case studies and dreams from African, Afrikaner and English-speaking male analysands that draw out the archetypal themes of conflict between the above and below, inner splits, defensive responses and the constellation of the great mother, in both its good and terrible form, as the compensation for lack of a containing society. If Faye had written this article today, she might be writing about the colonised and the colonisers but although she did not define it thus, she was clearly dealing with its impact in the consulting room on a daily basis.

A few years later Faye wrote for Harvest about the experiences of South African women. An article very much of the times it was written in, it nevertheless dealt honestly with the psychological fallout of apartheid where black African women were employed as domestic servants and nannies, raising the children of white women. 'From the very beginning the individual experiences two mothers or mother-worlds, two patterns of emotional behaviour, two modes of human relatedness, two standards for evaluating human beings, and a dichotomy in the body of society' (Pye, 1961). She illustrates this very early split by her work with a little girl with delayed speech who was torn between whether to place her baby doll in a pram or whether to wrap her in swaddling cloth and clutch her closely to her back as her nanny would have done.

In her obituary of Faye, von der Heydt wrote that life in South Africa became too much of a strain and she returned to London. Whether this strain was due to the pressures of living in such a divided country or something more personal, I can find no record of, or indeed, when her first marriage to Philip ended. It is noted by Joan Reggiori (1980) that she returned to London in the early sixties and it seems likely that she would have been fully settled by 1962 as she gave a talk at the annual summer conference of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology. It was here that she reunited with her fellow medical student Ruth M. Haslam whom she had not seen since the end of their medical training.

Faye's talk for the Guild conference was about Jung's use of the term soul, namely the anima in comparison to the religious sense of the word soul and the convergences and divergences of meaning in these two spheres. It is a talk that could perhaps be reevaluated in the light of the Red Book and the Black Books where Jung directly uses the term soul, yet it remains relevant and highlights what Jung neglected, the soul of women. In discussing Jung's use of the term animus Faye viewed it, in its most negative, 'devilish' form as a psychic structure capable of disconnecting a woman from her soul.

Reading the paper one can imagine it would have been an inspiring talk to hear. Characteristically clear and incisive, her ideas were supported by clinical case material, for, like Jung, she formed many of her ideas through the observations of her patients. Pye had also worked in a psychiatric hospital and knew the psyche in its most fragmented distressing form. She presented the case of Joan, a 25-year-old woman with schizophrenia who rebelled against her sheltered, restrictive middle-class family seeking a new life in London. She encountered a vastly different way of life and her naivety failed to protect her from the people she met who abused and exploited her. This led Faye to repeat her theme of the impact of the disturbances in the outer world and that these (referring to her patient) 'matched the disturbance in her inner emotional structure. And that this upheaval was directly related to her previous inchoate and structureless experiences in London' (Pye, 1963).

A further aspect of this paper was Faye's recognition that Jung's choice of words to symbolise parts of the psyche offered much needed containment and understanding:

"This is a need for words in which both the intellect and the emotions can rest: words that allay the restless search for meaning and security because they are symbols corresponding to complex psychic structures which are otherwise unconscious, unhoused and neglected. Inadequate compensations for the lack of satisfying verbal expression greet us on every side." (Pye, 1963, pp. 11-12)

In Claire Douglas's review of Faye's paper given to the International Conference of Jungian Analysts in 1974 she also draws out the familiar themes examined here. Faye's talk 'Images of Success in the Analysis of Young Women Patients' explored the influence of changing culture and values on woman's lives and the resulting inner and outer conflicts they faced:

"Pye describes a patient typical of this era: a father's daughter who feels empty and conflicted even in the middle of her pursuit of self-development. Emotion, marriage, motherhood, and mother are anxiously defended against because they bind and restrict." (Douglas, 1990, p.124)

On her return to London where she remained for nearly two decades Faye served two periods of chairmanship for the Jung Club and was an actively involved president right up until the time of her death. In addition to Grass Roots, she also initiated the Analytical Psychology Club public lectures held initially at the Royal Society of Medicine. She published many papers for Harvest and the Journal of Analytical Psychology. In the 1970s she left the Society of Analytical Psychology following Gerhard Adler's departure, to join him as a founding member (along with several other analysts) of the Association of Jungian Analysts. In the final seven years of her life, she was happily married to Arnold van Zwanenberg.

Learning about Faye's ideas, beliefs, and interests through her talks and writing as well as those who knew her, one sensed a life well lived. A woman who matured from the quiet and reserved analytic trainee upon whom von der Heydt reminisced, into, I believe, one who had found what Tillich (2000) referred to as The Ground of Being. Faye had a great energy and determination. She built her foundations gradually, with her medical training, immersion in Zurich and her own analysis and experiences in the field of clinical work. In later life she found the faith of her ancestors and was energised through prayer. In 1978 she gave a further talk to the Guild on Aspects of Jewish Prayer (Pye, 1978).

Faye Pye died on the 17th March 1980 leaving her fellow Club members bereft.

As someone to whom words were important, one can see why she chose the name Grass Roots. A vision of a sequential series of lectures for those needing the foundational knowledge. The ground is prepared, the seeds are sown, the roots emerge from the soil and from the groundswell of the membership, the centre is strengthened and the harvest can occur. Faye viewed this as the centrifugal and centripetal action of the Club and its members, the moving outwards and then coming back to the centre, that continues in an ever-repeating cycle.

This is the very essence of the Grass Roots.

Gail Bennett

References

1. Douglas, C. (2000) The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine. US: Backinprint.com.
2. Haslam, R.M. (1980) Tributes to Faye Pye. Harvest. No. 26, pp. 8-10.
3. Jung, C.G. (1968) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works Vol. 9i: (2nd Ed.). New Jersey: Princeton.
4. Pye, F. (1952) Our Patients are Alive: An Approach to the Practice of Psychosomatic Medicine. South African Medical Journal. 1st March, pp.166-170.
5. Pye, F. (1957) Some Analytical Problems Encountered in South Africa. Journal of Analytical Psychology. 2 (2), pp. 167-181.
6. Pye, F. (1961) Aspects of the Psychology of South African Women. Harvest. No.7 pp. 14-21. 7.
7. Pye, F. (1963) The Soul as a Function of Relationship in Psychology and Religion. Guild Lecture No.121. The Guild of Pastoral Psychology.
8. Pye, F. (1978) Aspects of Jewish Prayer. Guild Lecture No.193. The Guild of Pastoral Psychology.
9. Pye, F. (1979) The Seeds and the Harvest. Harvest. No. 25, pp. 1-2.
10. Reggiori, J. (1980) Tributes to Faye Pye. Harvest. No. 26, pp. 7-8.
11. Tillich, P. (2000) The Courage to Be. London: Yale University Press.
12. von der Heydt, V. (1980) Obituary Notice: Faye Pye. Journal of Analytical Psychology. 25 (4), p.379.