Fall 1989 Programming

Lecture: The Secret Life of Movies

Film as a medium is a resevoir of unconscious imagery. The work of great masters of the medium can be compared to alchemy, in which the search for commercial gold becomes transformed by a spiritual subtext of urgent creative autobiography that reveals a process of individuation. Alongside the story and day-residues of popular culture that we have grown used to finding in film, archetypal imagery makes its unexpected appearance. In this lecture, Dr. Beebe will show how this active imaginal process is alive in the movies of our leading contemporary filmmakers and will tell us how to look for it.

Workshop: The Mythic World of the Post-Modern Film 

“Reading” a post-modern film is not easy for those brought up on modern cinema. The content is often disturbing and the style is frequently strange. New kinds of protagonists have replaced the familiar hero and survivor figures, and familiar conventions of film narration are continually being challenged. Yet often there is a gripping intensity to the stories that are told in this new way. Among recent attempts to establish this new film style, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet stands out as a genuine mythic achievement. This is a complex work of art that records the emergence of new archetypal solutions to the problems left by the modern era.

After the special showing of the film, Dr. Beebe will conduct an inquiry into its imagery, which probes the deep wounds that modern culture and the myth of the hero that informs it have left for post-modern men and women to resolve.

John Beebe, M.D. is a Jungian analyst in San Francisco where he practices, teaches, and edits The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. He is a graduate of Harvard College and of the University of Chicago Medical School. After an internship and two additional years in the United States Public Health Service he did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University’s Medical Center. He graduated from the C.G. Jung Institute in 1978 and is active in that institute’s training program. He is also on the clinical faculty of the UC Medical School, San Francisco.

He is co-editor and author of Psychiatric Treatment: Crisis, Clinic and Consultation; editor of Money, Food, Drink, Fashion and Analytic Training (the proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Analytical Psychology) and of Apsects of the Masculine, a collection of Jung’s essays on masculine psychology to be published in 1989. His articles have also appeared in Spring Quadrant, Psychological Perspectives, and The Journal of Analytical Psychology.

Lecture: Relationship in the First Half of Life

Workshop: Relationship Between Men and Women: Is it Possible? 

James A. Hall, M.D. is Clinical Associate Professor at Southwestern Medical School, Dallas. A graduate of the Zurich Institute, he is a founding president of both the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts  and the C.G. Jung Institute, Dallas. His books include Jungian Dream Interpretation, Clinical Uses of Dreams, and The Jungian Experience. With Dr Polly Young-Eisendrath he has edited The Book of the Self: Person/Pretext/Process, containing essays from many theoretical positions on the concept of the Self.

Marion Woodman is a Jungian analyst practicing in Toronto. A diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, she is widely recognized for her work with eating disorders, the body, addictions, and the nature of the feminine principle. Her publications include The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter; Obesity, Anorexia, and The Repressed Feminine; Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride and The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation. She works with persons who struggle with addictions of many kinds, and her intuitive empathy is strengthened by the conviction that the struggle is primarily one of becoming more conscious and free.

Lecture: The tension between self and group development can be profoundly creative or sorely destructive. Using examples from the Bible, William James, Ursula LeGuin and analytic and consultive practice, this lecture will consider how individuals may participate in unconscious collective scapegoating processes which undermine self development while creating social injustice and pain and suffering in others.

Workshop: The seminar will explore selected topics of the lecture in greater detail. Dr. Colman is particularly interested in considering examples of the scapegoat processes in our personal, family, and work lives, concentrating on how these experiences have either become integrated or split off from the individual and group psyche. He will also explore methods of praxis and interpretation that have proved useful in aiding those possessed by the scapegoat to return to themselves and the community.

Arthur Colman is a Jungian Analyst and a member of the training faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco. He is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Medical School and teaches and lectures widely. He has served on the faculty of the School of Architecture at U.C. Berkeley helping to develop modern birth centers. He is currently Clinical Processor at U.C. Medical Center and president of the A.K. Rice Institute, a national organization devoted to the studies of unconscious life in groups and organizations. His books include Pregnancy: The Psychological Experience; Love and Ecstasy; the Group Relations Readers, and most recently The Father: Archetype and Social Role. He is currently at work on a book on Scapegoating.

Lecture: More than 2500 years of one-sided male family role-Patriarchy based on the Syzyzgy of Sky Father and Earth Mother-are beginning to crumble in response to the revolution in the collective female consciousness. The unconscious, eternally creative, is manifesting new and ancient images of the Archetype of the Father which we will explore through myth and clinical material.

Arthur Colman is a Jungian Analyst and a member of the training faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco. He is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Medical School and teaches and lectures widely. He has served on the faculty of the School of Architecture at U.C. Berkeley helping to develop modern birth centers. He is currently Clinical Processor at U.C. Medical Center and president of the A.K. Rice Institute, a national organization devoted to the studies of unconscious life in groups and organizations. His books include Pregnancy: The Psychological Experience; Love and Ecstasy; the Group Relations Readers, and most recently The Father: Archetype and Social Role. He is currently at work on a book on Scapegoating.

Lecture: Closeness

Distance-Closeness-the ethics, attachemnt, loss, transference, countertransferance, touching, intimacy, and sex: what are the aspects of these issues in the perspectives of organizational psychology, interpersonal psychoanalytical dynamics, communication dynamics and analytical psychology.

Pre-reading Practical Jung, particularly on transference, countertranference, love, and the wounded healer.

Workshop: Experiential Dream Adventure

Dr. Wilmer will work with a few dreams from the people who attend, using a group technique which he created for psychiatric residents, psychology residents, as well as social workers and therapists and with his patients. It is a new way of looking at the creative unconscious and the archetypal world in a way which any intelligent person can grasp.

Harry Wilmer is a senior Jungian analyst in practice in Salado, Texas. Trained first as a Freudian analyst, Dr. Wilmer has been professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; at the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University, Palo Alto. He has been a Captain in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps Reserve on active duty during the Korean Emergency. His work in the Navy was the subject of an ABC newtork television documentary about the therapeutic community based on his book Social Psychiatry in Action. More recent publications include Vietnam in Remission (co-editor) and Practical Jung. He is currently writing a sequel for the general public titled Understanding Jung. He has produced two documentaries; one based on Haight-Ashbury San Francisco Flower Children for the Public Broadcasting System; the other for KQED, San Francisco on his work at San Quentin Prison. He writes, paints, and directs The Institute for the Humanities at Salaldo of which he is president, director, and founder.

Lecture: Uncovering the Lost Feminine

The long-absent imagery of the archetypal feminine is reappearing in our age. Reflecting aspects of the instincts banished bt western culture, the imagery of the feminine draws us towards an acceptance of our larger selves and a healing of the mind/body split. We will consider the impact of the emerging feminine on our lives and culture as well as attempt to connect it to the ancient cultures where it flourished. 

Workshop: Women’s Development in Cultural Context

The emerging feminine in the inner self pushes individual women into difficult developmental tasks. To make space for the new demands of the psyche, women are becoming culture maker beings, creating new terms, new lifestyles. The workshop will offer a more extensive look at the specific difficulties women encounter in the conflict between modern culture and the full realization of the feminine in their lives. 

Betty Meador is a Jungian Analyst in Berkeley, California. Our of her interest in the feminine, she has studied Sumerian texts related to the goddess Innana. Her recitations of the poetry of the Sumerian priestess, Enheduanna, will appear as a forthcoming book.