Spring 2000 Programming

Workshop: We will seek to discern, through a series of questions and exercises, the sense of "self," the percepts about the Other, and the transactions which have been generated by our history. What creates our attractions, our patterns, our yearnings, our repetitions? These are the open-ended questions we shall examine together.

James Hollis, Ph.D., has a diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He lives and practices in Houston, Texas, where he is the Director of the C.G. Jung Educational Center. He is the author of The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other (Inner City Books, 1998), the fifth in his series for Inner City.

Lecture: Friday night we’ll review Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, which can either be read in book form or seen in the movie (currently in release). What can we learn from a man’s encounter with the Self, as facilitated by his anima, which is fixated on a woman with whom he is having an affair?

Workshop: Saturday will begin with a viewing of Nicholas Roeg’s groundbreaking movie Walkabout. We shall then discuss the way in which the animus attempts to open a young woman to world she has never known, how she responds, and how it ends up. We shall then look at the cultures the film brings together, and how they fare in coming to terms with each other. Finally, we shall question why the film was severely cut in its original release, how the director’s cut restores the original intent of the film, and what it means to us today.

John Van Eenwyck, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst practicing in Olympia, WA. He is also an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church of America. He has extensive experience both as a clinical practitioner and a teacher in the mental health field, and has authored numerous articles on a diverse array of topics in psychoanalytical journals. His latest book is entitled: Chaos and Strange Attractors: The Chaotic World of Symbols, published by Inner City Books, Toronto, 1997.

All religions instruct us to pay close attention to our intentions and actions in order to become responsible for our ethical and spiritual development. And yet, women have been uniformly discouraged in acquiring a knowledge of self-determination in their major life roles.

This workshop will examine the basic assumption that the mother is the single most important influence on her child’s development (exclusive of father, peers, and the cultural surroundings), and show how and why it is wrong and misleading. Drawing especially on Jung’s theory of the Divine Child archetype and the history of motherhood, the workshop will offer a new interpretation of the traditional fairy tale, Rumpelstilskin to show how and why the idealization of mothers and children serves us so badly. There will be ample time for discussion and a variety of film clips to illustrate the psychological consequences of "hothouse mothering".

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is a psychologist and Jungian analyst practicing in Burlington, Vermont. Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont Medical College, she has published ten books, many chapters and articles, and lectures widely on topics of resilience, women’s development, couple relationship, and the interface of contemporary psychoanalysis and spirituality. She is also a a long-time student of Zen teacher Roshi Philip Kapleau.

Her most recent books, published in 1997, are The Cambridge Companion to Jung (edited with Terence Dawson), The Resilient Spirit: Transforming Suffering into Insight and Renewal, and Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora. Her popular book You’re Not What I Expected: Love After the Romance has Ended was also recently reprinted in paperback. Other titles include Hags and Heroes: A Feminist Approach to Jungian Psychotherapy with Couples, Awakening to Zen: The Teachings of Roshi Philip Kapleau (edited with Rafe Martin), and Female Authority: Empowering Women Through Psychotherapy. She has just finished Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted to be published by Harmony Books in 1999.

Lecture: The Friday evening lecture addresses the problem of being stuck in a story, endlessly repeating the same script — a plight dramatize by Dracula, who was compelled by the vampire curse to feed on the living. Fortunately Scheherazade from "The Thousand and One Arabian Nights" shows a way out of stuck stories, by using the psychology of five fundamental genres of narrative — myth, fact, fairy tale, legend, and the favorite tale: transformation results from experiencing each genre in that specific order — a sequence characteristic of initiation rituals.

Workshop: The Saturday workshop grapples with the remaining three narrative crises. First is wandering among stories — after we escape a stuck plot, we must find another to live by, but often do not know how to choose, and so end up drifting indecisively among different tales. The biblical story of Babel and the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty dramatize the relativism and fragmentation of the situation, especially painful at midlife and in our postmodern time. The nine Muses from ancient Greece help here by revealing the logic of stories, which gives us criteria by which we can judge among tales, separating better from worse, true from false. The next narrative quandary is failing a story, and is exemplified by Sisyphus and King Arthur, who both follow specific scripts, but fail to reach their chosen ending. How to transform such failed dramas is the subject of the Buddhist tale, "The Brave Parrot", and the Jewish story, "The Golden Tree," which dwell on what might be called the practice and spirit of story. The fourth and perhaps most difficult narrative dilemma is being wounded by a story. The Flying Dutchman, Tristan and Isolde, and the Fisher King illustrate such wounding tales, where a desire or quest can never be attained. Goethe’s "Faust" and a Tibetan story, "The Old Meditator," reveal an unexpected resolution to this painful plight in what can be turned "attunement" to the "soul of story," which closely resembles spiritual illumination. Throughout the lecture and workshop various exercises will help us explore the myths, fairy tales, legends and favorite stories we live by, and how we can use them deal with our stuck, lost, failed and wounding life tales.

Allan Chinen, M.D., a psychiatrist in private practice in San Francisco, is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of In the Ever After, Once Upon a Midlife, Beyond the Hero, and Waking the World.

Workshop: The Saturday workshop will consider the many ways in which dreams, as provided by participants, capture both the crucial moments of a life process representing both hurdles and possibilities. Giannini divides Jung’s two stages of life into four quadrants based on typology’s Compass of the Soul as a framework for exploring how our dreams play into and through our critical life transitions. Participants are urged to prepare by reading the chapter entitled "Confrontation with the Unconscious" in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflectionsand "Stages of Life" in the Collected Works, and also by bringing their own dreams to share.

John Giannini, M.Div., M.A., M.B.A., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Chicago and Evanston. He holds an M.Div. in Religion and Psychology from St. Albert’s College and an M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. John has published articles and lectures widely throughout the U.S. and Canada on the wounded child and narcissistic/addictive behavior. He is the author of Compass of the Soul (forthcoming from the Center for the Application of Psychological Type).