Spring 2005

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
For I had lost the path that does not stray. (Dante, Inferno I of the Commedia)

LECTURE

A desire stirs in each of us at some point in our lives, prompting us to leave the familiar confines of family, neighborhood and routine and take to the road in response to one of the oldest archetypal impulses embedded in our psyche: pilgrimage.

The pilgrim is not a tourist, a road warrior, or one mobile for the sake of movement alone. Pilgrimage is a questing after some appetite in the soul that possessions or success will not satisfy. A poetic journey stirred by the process of individuation, it is also a sacred restlessness for an experience that transcends the normative, everyday reality we live out, at times, almost unconsciously. It is a journey both external and internal which insists on documenting itself in memory and in the act of writing. I call this action "pengrimage."

Jung reminds us that "the quality of inwardness is missing today:" ie an awareness of an inner correspondence or equivalence with an actual event or situation in the world. Pilgrimage is an attempt to allow for the presence of this correspondence between psyche, spirit and world through silence, solitude and meditation.

WORKSHOP

Joseph Campbell and one’s Personal Mythos

"Metaphor is the language of myth." (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor)

Morning Session
From September 1954 to August 1955, the well-known mythologist Joseph Campbell made a year long pilgrimage to India, then on to southeast Asia and Japan. In that journey he slowly realized what his life’s work was to be. Looking together at passages from the two journals he kept (Baksheesh and Brahman, and Sake and Satori), we will note his method, the content and the rising realization in Campbell of his own personal mythology as recorded in these books.

Afternoon Session
Like Campbell, each of us has within a personal myth that seeks its most appropriate path in the world. We will individually, and then together, explore the contours of our own myth through 3-4 writing exercises designed to uncover the metaphors that comprise our personal mythology. Coming after our morning conversation, these exercises will allow us to remember and choose an event or two in our own lives that we could acknowledge as having a powerful influence on who we have been and are continuing to become.

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D is core faculty, Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute where he teaches courses in mythology, classical literature and depth psychology. He is the author of 8 books, including: The Idiot: Dostoevsky’s Fantastic Prince (1984); The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (2000); Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (2004); Casting the Shadows: Selected Poems (2002); Just Below the Water Line: Selected Poems (2004).With Lionel Corbett he has co-edited Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field (2001) and Psychology at the Threshold (2002).

LECTURE: The Jewel in the Wound

The body plays an integral role in the expression of personal myth. Exploring the symbolic dimension of a body symptom helps to unravel the mystery of wounding and healing that lies hidden within the symptom itself. Dreams, visions and artwork will be utilized to bring meaning to such manifestations.

Within this context, Ms. Rothenberg will describe her personal experience with psychic wounds that manifested as physical scars and that led her to Africa to study scarification rites. The scars, instead of simply being the source of embarrassment and pain, became the sacred jewels that illuminated the path of self-understanding, thus creating a link to the spiritual meaning embedded in a body symptom.

WORKSHOP: Body Symptoms in Individuation

Physical illness presents us with a challenge: to turn something problematic into something meaningful. Early primal experiences are manifest both psychologically and physiologically through one’s life journey. Suffering cannot be avoided when traveling the road of individuation; yet renewal is born out of the darkness of the unconscious and of the body.

This workshop will be a presentation and illustration of the role of body symptoms in reflecting and stimulating the process of individuation. It will include discussion of the archetypal dimension of diseases of the skin and the intestines. Participants are invited to bring examples from their experiences involving the body.

Rose-Emily Rothenberg, M.A. is a Jungian Analyst practicing in Pacific Palisades, California, and is on the faculty of the C.G.Jung Institute of Los Angeles. Her special interest–on which she has lectured nationally and internationally–is the relationship between disease and the psyche, how body symptoms can be central to discovering one’s myth, and the benefit of using the expressive arts to better understand one’s body symptoms. She is the author of The Jewel in the Wound.

LECTURE: Aphrodite’s Shadow in Beverly Hills and Hollywood

No mere sculpted image or poetic fragment from ancient time, Aphrodite lives mightily today in the lilt, glance, style, indeed — in the Fate of countless women and the bedazzled admirers who pursue her. Whatever Aphrodite’s claim to Beauty and the ‘erotic moment,’ hers is a shifting image whose nocturnal associations may have as much to do with a night of death as a night of love. Drawing upon a childhood in Beverly Hills and her ten years as a Hollywood actor, Dr. Landau will thus explore the impact of the archetype on women¹s lives with clinical examples, tales of bygone actresses, mythical amplification, and feminine typology generally in this uniquely personal analysis of the Aphrodite archetype.

WORKSHOP: Dionysus and Aphrodite: Desire and the Search for Beauty

From Socrates or Euripides to the Inquisition to Jim Morrison or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the irresistible power of Dionysus plays essentially the same role. Arousing erotic desires, fomenting revolt, conjuring visionary experience, Dionysus unveils religious dimensions of sexuality and the body that normative institutions invariably condemn. While the cosmos of Dionysus includes an entourage of phallic deities, his beloved Aphrodite (whose identity extends to maenad, Ariadne, Persephone, Great Goddess) remains the prime image of Beauty on which eros focuses. Dr TePaske will explore this archetypal pair in various social and individual contexts, emphasizing the intrapsychic tandem of desire and Beauty so central in the soul’s realization. (slides and video excerpts will be used).

Arlene TePaske-Landau, Ph.D. is a native of Beverly Hills and a veteran of Hollywood film and television, who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Masters Degree in Psychology from Cal State Northridge, and both a Masters and Ph.D. Degree in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. Landau is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and the Interregional Society of Jungian Analyst, and possesses a highly differentiated grasp of both Jung’s classic psychological types and the mythically-based typological approach of Archetypal Psychology (Hillman).

Bradley A. TePaske, Ph.D. is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich, a clinical psychologist, and an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. An accomplished artist and religious historian, Dr. TePaske holds an Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking and Art History from UMASS Amherst and a Ph.D. in Depth Psychology from the Union Institute of Cincinnati. His areas of research include Hindu Tantra, Shamanism, Graeco-Roman Mystery Religions, Gnosticism, and the Goddess traditions particularly those of Kali, Mary, Magdalen, Sophia, Aphrodite, and Demeter/Persephone.

LECTURE and WORKSHOP

In a time of cultural fragmentation and danger, many of us yearn for wisdom and practical guidance that can help us live meaningful lives. Such wisdom and direction must speak directly to our inner lives as individuals at least as much as to our outer conduct in the world and our relations with others. Contemporary and traditional depth psychologies aim at facilitating essential processes of inner transformation and renewal.

On Friday evening, we will explore "horizontal" and "vertical"transformations, using two symbolic images: that of an inner psychic "law" and its liberating transgression, and that of the psyche as an "oil lamp" which transforms itself by consuming itself.

On Saturday, we will look at an all-encompassing "circumambulatory" transformation, as depicted in an important set of Renaissance alchemical illustrations.

All three of these image systems function much like dream images which can facilitate a dialogue in depth between consciousness and the unconscious. These systems belong to psychological and spiritual lineages, which promote practical ways of working on oneself aimed at fundamental inner transformation. We will discuss them in light of the seminal insights of C. G. Jung.

Steven M. Joseph, M.D., is a Jungian analyst and Board certified psychiatrist practicing in Albany, California (near Berkeley), and in Tucson, Arizona. He is an analyst member and training analyst of the C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco, and the immediate past editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. He has written and taught on Jungian analytical psychology and traditional sacred psychology, as well as on clinical Jungian analysis in relation to other psychoanalytic schools. He is a longtime student and teacher in the Jewish esoteric traditions of Kabbalah and Hasidim.