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Obituary: Dr Ian Player
As many of you may already have heard, Dr Ian Player had a severe stroke last Thursday and passed away peacefully on Sunday, November 30, at his home in Karkloof Valley, KZN, at the age of eighty seven.
Ian Player played a significant role in the original establishment of the C.G. Jung Centre in Cape Town. In 1984, at the instigation of Vera Bührmann and several others, the Jung Centre was conceived at a meeting in the Hohenhort that led to the inauguration of the Cape of Good Hope Centre for Jungian Studies in the Drakensberg in 1987. Ian Player was part of that original meeting that also included Sir Laurens van der Post, Graham Saayman, Renos Papadopoulos and Ian McCallum.
For his contributions to Analytical Psychology, Ian Player was acknowledged by being awarded the status of Honorary Member of the IAAP in 2007.
On Friday, his brother, Gary Player, tweeted the following very moving message:
“My beloved brother Ian has cast his canoe on the river of life that will shortly take him across to the other side. I will miss you. Love.”
He was passionate about canoeing and one of his books was about that topic: Men, Rivers and Canoes. He also wrote a biography: Into the River of Life.
Ian, regarded as the grandfather of conservation in South Africa, is credited with saving the white rhino from extinction in KZN in the 60’s. About 96% of the world population of White Rhinos are now found in this area.
He is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter to whom we extend our heartfelt condolences.
John Gosling
President: SAAJA
Ian Player and Jungian Psychology: A Personal Memoir from IAAP Honorary Member,
Graham S. Saayman
In the 1980’s, years of sociopolitical anguish in South Africa, a group of nature conservationists and mental health professionals joined forces to develop the Cape of Good Hope Centre for Jungian Studies. The Centre was conceived in Cape Town in the midst of a national crisis that threatened civil war.
Years of work by Vera Buhrmann, then the only practicing Jungian analyst in Africa, had laid the foundations and, in less than a decade, the professional training centre with an educational public wing was internationally established and renamed The Southern African Association of Jungian Analysts. This rapid development owed much to Ian Player’s enthusiasm for Jungian psychology. Ian had extensive personal experience of the practical application of Jungian thought to the healing potential of Wilderness. He knew that the destruction of wilderness is directly linked to the psychological alienation so evident in this age of global mayhem and ecological terracide. Contemporary earth scientists confirm that ecological devastation, due to accelerating climate change as a side-effect of human technology, will likely be comparable only to the effects of full-scale nuclear war.
During those dark years, in the financial austerity and death throes of a bankrupt political system, Ian Player held the line with extraordinary inner confidence. He had deep respect for roundtable discussions and he brought energy and calm certainty to the work. At times of doubt, he said: “When you spread your bread upon the waters, with a proper attitude to life, life will respond in kind.”
Ian Player worked closely with Laurens van der Post, friend and biographer of Jung, who shared his passion for wilderness as sanctuary, cathedral and container for the inner journey. Together they brought the vision, expertise and fund-raising skills necessary to ground the project in reality. Equally important contributions came from Magqubu Ntombela, who, with his deep understanding of the fauna and flora of his place of birth in Zululand, had worked with Ian to establish the Wilderness Leadership School
Ian kept dream diaries tracking reflections on his dreams over many years. The archetypal dream organically orchestrates the process of individuation with the oversight and wisdom of our evolutionary origins with animals and plants. Dream language depicts adaptive, ethical choices at critical phases of development and dream appreciation is uniquely suited to both conservation contexts and psychotherapeutic practice.
Ian Player pioneered the notion of ecological sustainability as the central problematic of our times and identified the restoration of an harmonious relationship with nature as essential to the survival of civilization in this disconnected, technocratic age. This conviction drove his commitment to the embryonic Jungian Centre and clarifies how the Wilderness Leadership School came to form a cornerstone of The Southern African Association of Jungian Analysts. Without Ian Player, the development of SAAJA would not have unfolded as it did. Nevertheless, his vision of a uniquely African training program in Jungian practice with ecology at the core of its curriculum proved difficult to achieve. Later, he initiated his own public program of Jungian dream appreciation in Kwazulu-Natal.
Ian was a fabulous storyteller. He held an audience spellbound as he related how the ways of the snake and the lion profoundly influenced his understanding of conservation and the psyche. But he is perhaps best remembered for rescuing the white rhinoceros from extinction in the 1960s. Sadly, his latter years witnessed the exponential acceleration of criminal butchering of the rhinoceros due to the superstition that its horn possesses magical powers and a status measured only by gold coin.
But the true alchemy of the rhinoceros horn resides in its golden energy and its strength of discernment with the power to pierce and split the veil of illusion blinding human consciousness to the inner truth that shows the way to freedom from attachment. The real power of the rhinoceros is rooted deeply in the earth. The rhinoceros stands guard as protector and custodian of the planet. To destroy the rhinoceros whilst seeking to usurp its power is an act of self-destructive ignorance and folly.
Ian Player, well ahead of his time, pioneered ecology, depth psychology and the interface between them. He came at a paradoxical moment where the material world is overvalued above all price and analytical psychology, an antidote to the toxin, is still dismissed by the mainstream orthodox establishment as mystical and out of touch with the real – a potentially fatal error for the world.
Ian Player spread his bread upon the waters. Now that the great pillar has fallen, well may we ask: Who will pick up the baton? Who has the capacity, the strength, the experience, the wisdom and the oratory? When comes such another?
Graham S. Saayman 8 December 2014