There are two of us, sisters, Joan and Susan McMillan. We were born (in the 1950s) and brought up in Campbeltown, a small, out-of-the-way place on the west coast of Scotland. Susan completed her school education at the local school while Joan was sent to boarding school for her secondary education.
We both went to university, Susan to study maths and statistics at Glasgow University, and Joan to study physics at Edinburgh University. We both graduated (B.Sc. hons), when Susan went on to gain a Scottish teaching qualification and then to teach maths in large city schools, while Joan stayed on at university to take a research degree (M.Phil.) before moving on to an industrial research post in London.
After 6 years Joan had had enough of industrial research, so, hoping that university would prove to be a freer, more fertile environment, she took a research post at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. (It is conventional to interject here that by this time Joan had notched up a number of scientific publications and one patent to her name, and had attended a number of major, international conferences.)
With both of us now living and working in Glasgow, we decided to pool our resources to buy a house, which we duly did. However, the university environment proved to be every bit as bad as the industrial one, and so, before her 2 year research contract had expired, Joan quit and, once again in search of greater freedom, turned from the world of science to the world of the arts, specifically to fiction writing.
Certainly this gave her much greater freedom to chose where to live, and with Susan also feeling she was ready for a change, we decided to move together, and chose Gairloch, a very small town on the north-west coast of Scotland, where Susan was able to get a teaching post with a remit to set up a computing department in the local secondary school. Susan’s job subsequently included promotion to network manager as well as head of faculty in charge of three departments. The limitations of teaching to the school curriculum led Susan to explore the world of life coaching. After undertaking a coach training programme Susan, drawing on earlier experience as a free-lance photographer, set up a small life coaching business. Meanwhile Joan’s work included managing a restaurant, computerising the accounts of a local business as well as running a bed and breakfast business.
We have been here for the last 20 or so years, and where our research has been carried out.
Ever since student days we had been spending around a month every summer travelling abroad. These were independent, back-packing trips to the most distant, interesting, uncivilised and exotic places we could afford at the time, stretching our resources by hitch-hiking and sleeping in a tent pitched wherever we could find the space for it. We explored countries from North America, through much of Europe, both eastern (behind the iron curtain in those days) and western, to north and West Africa, and to the Far East. Our final trip was 6 weeks in China in the late 1980s.
The writing life proved to be as great a disillusionment to Joan as the scientific one had been, but at this stage she believed the deficiency to be her own rather that any fault in the way society is run, and so she suffered a massive loss of confidence resulting, finally, in a mental breakdown.
Ironically, however, this proved to be the breakthrough event which led her to explore her own mind. In an effort to find a cure for herself she experimented with her own life and behaviour, and explored the sciences of the mind, and homed in, finally, on 2 things: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and the life and work of Carl Jung.
Following Jung into the world of dream interpretation, and with, now, the full involvement of Susan, there began a 10 year period of intensive research whose outcome is the work presented here and elsewhere.
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