A Robert Romanyshyn Workshop, Orpheus, and the Thunderclap
- aphillipsarts
- Jun 23
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 10
Sometime around ten years ago I attended a day with Robert Romanyshyn in London, which if memory serves me was organised by the Sesame Institute, “a Dramatherapy approach using embodied imagination, archetypal symbol, movement, story, creative play.” Romanyshyn is a Jungian Analyst, Emeritus Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and as a scholar of Depth Psychology he has authored a number of books. This comes across in his conversations and presentations that can be found online, but in person I found him to be a particularly soulful, embodied, and attentive person.
With the latter quality I am thinking of a particular kind of attention to archetypal themes, the “hand of God in the everyday,” to words and language, and to the ways in which the body communicates and expresses the inner life of soul. Describing himself as a phenomenologist, Romanyshyn is primarily interested in subjective experience, and as such is very much in the world, capable of bringing the richness of myth into the room.
A Moment in Myth: Orpheus and the thunderclap
During our group workshop in London there was a reenactment of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. My memory of exactly how this was structured and performed within the group is hazy now, but there was one incredibly powerful moment which will always stay with me. A key element in this story is about not looking back. This is the command that Orpheus receives from Hades when attempting to lead the soul of his deceased wife Eurydice back to the land of the living from the Underworld. As this was being enacted by those present, the words “Don’t... look... back” were pronounced emphatically by one of the facilitators leading (it could have been Robert himself), to which the astonishing response was a huge clap of thunder.
This thunder was not the noise of something being sounded in the room, or the group being instructed to make a collective noise to signify this, but a real elemental response from the Gods. This was to be the one and only clap of thunder we heard that day. As Depth Psychologists and those who work with myth and archetypal patterns, we are accustomed to working and thinking metaphorically, but this made something undeniably present in a very visceral way. The response was stunned silence, then a collective “WOW!”
The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
The myth of Orpheus has long captured the imagination of poets, artists, and therapists alike. It is a story of love, loss, and the limits of human longing. Orpheus, the great musician, descends into the Underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice, who died shortly after their wedding. His music is so beautiful that it moves even Hades and Persephone, who agree to release Eurydice on one condition: that Orpheus not look back at her until they have both reached the surface.
Of course, just before reaching the upper world, Orpheus does turn around. Eurydice vanishes, this time forever.
This myth is rich with psychological meaning. From a depth perspective, it speaks to the temptation to retreat into memory or to cling to the past, and the profound cost of doing so. It also addresses the tension between faith and doubt, between trust in the unseen and the anxiety of separation. In therapy, the “not looking back” can be read as an invitation to honour the past without becoming ensnared by it.
Thunder as Archetypal Communication
The thunderclap that coincided with that spoken injunction—“Don’t look back”—was more than meteorological coincidence. In mythological traditions, thunder is often understood as the voice of the gods. In Greek myth, Zeus wields thunder as a symbol of divine power and intervention. In Norse lore, it is Thor’s hammer that makes the heavens rumble. In many Indigenous cosmologies, thunder is similarly understood as a sacred force; powerful, sudden, and transformative.
In archetypal terms, thunder is a disruption. It pierces the ordinary with the extraordinary. It reminds us that there are forces larger than us, that speak when they will and are not under our control. Within the frame of the workshop, this thunderclap felt like a moment of what Jung might call synchronicity—a meaningful coincidence that bridges inner and outer worlds.
In Romanyshyn’s work, such moments are not random, but meaningful events that punctuate and deepen our psychological experience. They ask to be listened to with the ear of the soul.
Who Is Robert Romanyshyn?
To understand the resonance of that thunderclap, and why it was so memorable in the context of this particular workshop, it’s helpful to know more about Robert Romanyshyn himself.
Romanyshyn is a founding member of the faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, one of the most well-known centres for the study of depth psychology. With a PhD in psychology and a background in literature and philosophy, he has spent decades weaving together phenomenology, poetics, dream work, and mythology into a deeply personal and relational approach to the psyche. His teaching and writing reflect a commitment not only to intellectual inquiry but to soul-making, in the sense described by James Hillman, an attunement to the images and stories that shape our inner lives.
Over the years, Romanyshyn has written extensively on psychology’s cultural history and philosophical foundations. One of his most influential books, Technology as Symptom and Dream, explores how technological consciousness is not just a neutral tool but an expression of the Western psyche, how even the inventions and infrastructures around us carry psychic and symbolic weight.
His later works, like The Wounded Researcher and Ways of the Heart, move more directly into the imaginal and poetic. In The Wounded Researcher, he argues that inquiry must come from a place of vulnerability, that we cannot stand outside our research, but are always implicated in it. He proposes “a reverie stance,” a willingness to be shaped by the very material we are exploring.
Romanyshyn has also written evocatively on grief, love, and the poetics of the broken heart. In his essay “The Cry of Merlin,” he writes of the importance of listening to the wounded places in ourselves and in the world, not with the aim of repairing them in a utilitarian sense, but of responding soulfully.
In person, as I experienced during that day in London, he is someone who embodies this approach. His way of speaking is slow and spacious, alive with metaphor and pause. He listens with full attention. He honours the unsaid. There is a palpable reverence for the invisible, and for the power of image, myth, and moment.
Ways of the Heart
Robert Romanyshyn’s book Ways of the Heart: Essays Toward an Imaginal Psychology offers further insight into his orientation. In it, he writes about the imaginal realm, that liminal space between inner and outer, personal and collective, matter and metaphor. The heart, for Romanyshyn, is not only the seat of emotion but a place of depth knowing, mythic resonance, and embodied presence.
What struck me most during the workshop, and what I have since revisited in reading his work, is Romanyshyn’s ability to remain faithful to both scholarship and soul. He does not reduce myth to symbol, or psychology to a set of tools or techniques. Instead, he invites us into a relationship with psyche, with image, with story.
His phenomenological stance asks that we slow down, notice, and attune, to the subtle movements of meaning that ripple beneath the surface of our everyday experience. In Ways of the Heart, he describes the necessity of being undone by love, by longing, by grief. These are not pathologies to fix, but thresholds to be honoured.
The Presence of the Invisible
In hindsight, the thunder that accompanied the Orpheus enactment feels like an announcement from that threshold, a crack between worlds. It was as though the myth came alive, not only through the bodies and voices in the room, but through the world itself. The sky responded.
Romanyshyn often speaks of the world as animated, alive with soul. His approach reminds me of Hillman’s idea of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and how events that might seem peripheral may in fact carry symbolic charge. In that moment of thunder, the myth broke through the workshop container and spilled into the larger field.
And isn’t that the hope of depth work? That what we explore in the sanctuary of the therapy room, the studio, or the workshop, might reverberate outwards, that the soul might show itself, however briefly, through weather, word, or wonder?
A Final Reflection and Glance Back to the Workshop With Robert Romanyshyn
In reflecting on this day with Robert Romanyshyn, I am reminded that depth psychology is not merely a way of thinking, it is a way of being in the world. It is a discipline of presence, of listening, and of allowing images, stories, and even storms to speak. It is about learning to live with the poetic resonance of myth, and to recognise when something meaningful moves through us, or around us.
The Orpheus story, for all its heartbreak, remains a vital parable. It cautions against looking back, not to encourage forgetting, but to honour the risk of moving forward with faith. And sometimes, when we’re lucky, the world replies.
Andrew Phillips is a Visual Artist, Art Psychotherapist, Creative Mentor / Life Coach, in south Wales.
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