The Iceberg in the Room: A Causal Layered Analysis of Self with the Futures Sense of Yearning

This Futures focussed paper shares my creative response to a reflexive ricochet of being researcher, to unexpectedly becoming the researched and back again. I am currently using phenomenologically art-led and heuristic research methods to explore the implications of the Futures Senses in tertiary career education. The field of career theory is holistic and multidisciplinary. It draws from psychological, sociological and cultural fields to contextualise human action across the lifespan. Therefore, I work with people in transition and anticipation. This paper emerged from my immersion in the Futures Sense of Yearning and the moment I recognised the futures sense of Yearning in myself. This unexpected epiphany initiated a reflexive response as spectator of, and traveller on, my own transitional and anticipatory experience which was hovering in the spaces between the inner and outer self. Using a Jungian spontaneous drawing technique I set to give voice to what Jung noted as the ‘… two worlds: the world of the external perception and the world of the perception of the unconscious…’. This process revealed latent embodied knowing that surfaced through dialogue with the artwork. The layered emergent data of the artwork is analysed using a Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). The CLA invites diverse and layered perspectives of the subject of inquiry by examining it from the perspectives of litany, systems, worldviews and metaphor. Inayatullah uses an iceberg analogy, to illustrate the layers of an inquiry that are simultaneously exposed and discrete; known, unknown and ‘re-known’. Thus, a CLA of self is used, to reveal the ‘iceburg in the room’, with intention to explicate the meaning of the personal, as it relates to the collective.