FREDRIC MATTESON's Page

Danny Deardorff ("The Other Within") recently met with Fredric Matteson (Contextual-Conceptual Therapy: Guiding the Suicidal Person Using Maps, Models, & Metaphors) for a four hour conversation at Mossyrock in Port Townsend to discuss the commonality of their work and the importance of mythopoesis [myth-making] and metaphor in healing and re-membering. Afterwards, Deardorff had this endorsement about Matteson's CCT work with suicidal individuals:

"The truly remarkable discovery that Fredric Matteson has made is that the suicidal person is struggling in what he terms a 'bifurcated state.' In my mythological work on the experience of 'otherness' I have called this bifurcation a disjunction between one's inter-personal identity and one's intra-personal identity. The importance of Matteson's discovery for gaining a deeper insight into the lived experience of suicidality cannot be overstated. The duality, the either-or-sense, of the bifurcation triggers an over-literalizing rigidity, a one-sidedness which, in Matteson's revolutionary view, must be "destabilized." From the mythic perspective this is the oldest medicine in the world -- the ritual elder takes the initiand into a sacred uncertainty, the liminal condition, where identity disintegrates, expands, and is renewed. Because the suicidal person is on the front lines of the modern dilemma, I believe this work is of the greatest importance for us all." ~ Daniel Deardorff, Author of "The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, & Psyche"; Founder of the Mythsinger Foundation.