Meet The Founder

In the 1980’s, Lyn Cowan, a Jungian Analyst, and I put together a three-day conference along the St. Croix River called Echo’s Subtle Body, where Robert Bly and James Hillman met for the first time and after significant sparks, became fast friends. Diane Di Prima, Patricia Berry, Nor Hall and Charles Ponce were also featured along with the reggae band Shangoya and the dancer Mindy Melemed.

In the meantime, I played in Rock and Country Rock bands as a drummer, wandering Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Canada, making a couple of records (one of which made it to #1 somewhere in New York State) and sleeping in lots of cheap motels. Along the way, I worked as Assistant Manager of the Great Plains Supply Lumber Co. in Stanley, ND, a Nursing Asst. with bedridden elderly near downtown Minneapolis, as #2 man on a 3,000-acre wheat & cattle ranch south of Minot, ND, and as a grunt making bean bag chairs in a mattress factory near the Monte Carlo Bar in the Minneapolis warehouse district.

I also studied voice at the Roy Hart Theatre in Southern France and dance & theatre in Minneapolis and Madrid – ballet, modern, jazz, tango, flamenco. My own theatre, The Dream Guild, started in my third-floor studio on Portland Ave. in Minneapolis – a space that packed in 130 people for the shows held half-time in the loft during legendary, live music parties, some featuring the R-Section, a jazz band feted in Europe.   The theatre finally went official as a company-in-residence at The Pillsbury House. Overall, I ended up producing and acting in more than two dozen plays.

I worked on developing my therapy chops at CUHCC – Community-University Health Care Center, mentored in part by Dr. Jerry Kroll. After my mother’s death, I started recording piano music in Amsterdam, eight times now, weaving in Flamenco guitar (Pedro Cortez & Ben Abraham), and voice (La Conja), plus playing cajon for various local Flamenco artists back in the days of The Loring Cafe & La Bodega.

A group of friends and I formed MASC (Minnesotans Actively Seeking Community), designed a treatment program featuring Jung’s, John Weir Perry’s, and James Hillman’s work, got financial backing from the Givens family in St. Paul with the help of Ranae Hansen, and then funding from Hennepin County to open and operate a Rule 36, Category 1 Mental Health Treatment program called Janus – a 24-bed residential program for mentally ill young adults featuring dream work, art therapy, living skills training, and group and individual therapy. After painting the walls and finishing the unpainted furniture, we opened and operated for several years until the state eliminated that treatment category in favor of just teaching living skills.

I then ended up working 24-hour shifts in crisis intervention for the Dakota County Sheriff and 13 police departments, a fantastic challenge for a trauma-surviving introvert, migrating to outpatient sex offender treatment at Project Pathfinder as a volunteer, eventually working my way up to Clinical Director.  Pathfinder is where I learned about Responsivity during a training from Robin Goldman - finally a name for what I was doing! Soon I was teaching a 6-week, 12-hour Orientation Group using The Web, my toys and film clips 3 times a week, one of them at the Ramsey County Workhouse. The Workhouse guys didn’t mind if group went an hour extra as I tried out new toys and ideas on them to see if they made sense.

Then followed stints as a Psychologist at Stillwater Prison and as a Clinical Supervisor and Associate Clinical Director at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP), a controversial Civil Commitment Program, and finally a freelancer at Alpha Human Services. One night, listening to Minnesota Public Radio many years prior, I had heard about the intransigent offenders at MSOP and vowed to find a way to reach them. My approach to Responsivity and working with violence evolved out of these experiences.

Years earlier, after presenting a talk on Mythology and Nuclear power at a conference at the University of New Mexico, I discovered a geometry teaching tool invented by New Mexico native and mathematician Bradford Smith (step-father of basketball player Luc Longley) with the help of my friend and mentor of nearly 50 years, Joan Buresch Talley (Jungian Analyst and daughter of Allen Dulles, 101 years old now), first naming it Finisterre (after a village in Portugal that was once considered the last outpost of civilization before the world ended a ways out into the Atlantic Ocean), and then renaming it Hermes’ Web (in part in honor of my grandfather Ray who always wore a Mercurius/Dragon tie pin), which eventually led to purchasing 500,000 linear feet of plastic, 200,000 black rubber ends and manufacturing Hermes’ Web in my hometown, as well as gathering any toy that KB Toys, ToysRUs, and the internet offered which brought to life crucial psychological concepts.

At first, I used my hand as the barrier on the Web between the ego and the unconscious, but then discovered surplus pieces of rubber at the Axman surplus store, eventually finding a company in Chicago that offered a superior material in large sheets we had to cut up & punch holes in. Along the way, I experimented constantly with the Web and toys in treatment – outpatient and inpatient – and at the Ramsey County Workhouse, to help engage clients and make treatment make enough sense that they overcame their resistance and bought into a significant process of core-level change.

Along the way, I was introduced to Arnold & Any Mindell’s Process Psychology and attended numerous trainings in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Oregon. I also attended 10-day trainings in India and Slovakia - intense gatherings where a large group worked on very difficult real world issues with the people in the midst of them: castes in India, the relationship between Russian factions, racism in America. I also firewalked in the Slovakian mountains thanks to the guidance of a Polish woman. Important friends were made and important teachers had big influences on my work: Kate Jobe, Joe Goodbread, Max Schupbach, and especially Stephen Schuitvoerder.

My children assisted in gathering all these toys and storing and processing them. I also worked directly with difficult students via my African-American community activist friend Bobby Hickman and The City, Inc., David West in the Minneapolis Public School System, Bridget O’Flaherty in a special St. Paul Schools’ program for highly problematic students, and with Native foster children via Levi Eaglefeather.  I presented on the Web, the toys, and responsivity at many conferences and workshops.  I also worked individually and in groups with many clients, students and prisoners, learning much from them in the process that all evolved into The Missing Pieces/Web Sight Program based on responsivity and centered on Hermes’ Web, the Hoberman Sphere, and the toys.

Finally, semi-retired, I have time to do justice to all I’ve learned by developing this website and everything offered here – essentially my life’s work and legacy hovering in hyperspace.  That and continuing to help with harvest every fall, running the combine for corn, and sometimes beans.  I couldn’t let it all just fade away!

"The man who would learn the human mind will gain almost nothing from experimental psychology. Far better for him to put away his academic gown, say goodbye to the study, and wander with a human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of the prison, the asylum, and the hospital, in the drinking-shops, brothels, and gambling hells, in the salons of the elegant, in the exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, religious revivals and sectarian ecstasies, through love and hate, through the experiences of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer store of knowledge than textbooks a foot thick could give him. Then would he know to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul."

Carl G. Jung