Spring 2009 Programming

C. G. Jung was very familiar with the Hindu Upanishads and the profound traditions of Indian spirituality.  He drew upon them for his understanding of core concepts of the psyche, especially the Self within the individuation process.  This lecture will explore the nature of the innermost Self as revealed in the Upanishads and developed through the philosophical teachings of Vedanta. The distinctions between Eastern and Western models of the psyche and human selfhood will be clarified in order to define the ultimate implications of the individuation process against the background of one of humanity’s richest and most differentiated spiritual cultures, followed by an ample opportunity for questions and discussion. 

Workshop:  Advaita Vedanta and the Search for Wholeness

According to Advaita (Nondual) Vedanta, it is the superimposition of the Self on the psyche and world that is the root cause of suffering, and as long as the Self remains undifferentiated from these causes, true psychological health cannot be attained. Until the Self is known, one takes the Self to be other than what it is and therefore never truly feels comfortable.  The Vedantic Self, when added to Jung’s model of the psyche, allows for completion of the psyche’s natural quest for wholeness that is sought through the individuation process.  The Vedantic Self can be seen as both the source of and the fulfillment of the religious function of the psyche, in that it fulfills the psyche’s search for union with God.  The workshop will allow participants to explore in depth their personal integration of these themes through meditation and spiritual exercises that will allow experiential understanding of these concepts.  We will also discuss how these insights can be applied to therapeutic practice. 

Saturday Workshop Participants, please make note of our new time frame:
we are experimenting with a half-hour sack lunch discussion on-site instead
of our usual 90 minute off-site break.  Please bring your lunch.

CAROL WHITFIELD, Ph.D., has an M.A. in Sanskrit from the University of California, Berkeley (1982), a Ph.D. in Phenomenology of Religions from the Graduate Theological Union (1992), and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the San Francisco School of Psychology (1997).  During the 1970s Carol lived a monastic life in India where she studied Advaita Vedanta. Since her return from India, she has taught Vedanta extensively on both coasts and was one of the founders and the administrative manager of Sandeepany West, Institute for the Study of Vedanta and Sanskrit, located in Piercy, California, and later, of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, Institute for the Study of Advaita Vedanta and Sanskrit, in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. One of her primary interests is the synthesis of Western psychology and Eastern spirituality. She is a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Berkeley, California.

We would perhaps like to forget that there is an archetypal basis for the disturbing violence that is prominent in today’s world.  This lecture describes how to understand violence from an archetypal perspective and why this task is necessary if we are to bridge the dissociation between conscious and transconscious reality. For most of us, “psychic reality” is still in the realm of ideas, and psychologically, we live in a pre-Copernican world.  In his most seminal works, Jung wrote that violence and destructiveness are inextricable aspects of psychic reality and that violence is always encountered as part of the individuation process.  The hostile and violent impact of the unconscious upon the ego often calls upon us to experience and contain intense emotions of rage and violence. This need not be “bad news” if we remain aware of the larger picture.  

Workshop:  Animals in our Midst

We are surrounded by animals, in our dreams, our psyches, our homes, and in the wild.  As pets or feral creatures, animals inhabit our inner and outer worlds.  Who has not dreamed of animals or encountered animals in life?  We have pets and we have pet ideas.  Our complexes are pets that at times behave and at other times wreak havoc in the house when we aren’t “at home.”  Transpersonal and transconscious psychic dimensions are mirrored to us through animals. This workshop explores the ways that animals play a fundamental, problematic, emotional and humorous role in psychic development.  The speaker will use dreams and experiences with animals to elucidate the idea that for the human psyche an animal is always a symbol and holds the possibility of transformation and connection to the non-personal psychic realm. Animal lovers and non-lovers are equally welcome.     

Saturday Workshop Participants, please make note of our new time frame:

we are experimenting with a half-hour sack lunch discussion on-site instead

of our usual 90 minute off-site break.  Please bring your lunch.

PAMELA J. POWER, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst with a private practice in Santa Monica, California. She was trained at the Los Angeles Jung Institute and certified in 1987. She is past Clinic Director and past Training Director of the Los Angeles Institute and currently is a member of the faculty and of the training committee.  She is also a member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts.  She has lectured on a variety of topics including: religious nature of the psyche, archetype of sacrifice, music and the psyche, animals and individuation. Her most recent published articles are: “Secret Agonies in Analytic Communities: Unbearable Countertransferences,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, 2007; “Death of the Analyst,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, 2005: “A New Dog-Image,” Psychological Perspectives, 2004.     

Lecture:  Fragmentation and Containment in a Shrinking World

In this “global age” of limited resources, we struggle for self-survival and species-survival while witnessing the demise of integral cultures and local economies. We observe unprecedented waves of human migration and an alarming escalation of communal warfare. At the same time, we collectively awaken to the interconnections in nature and between people of disparate cultural origins. We witness a rising esprit of global consciousness.

Encounters with the strange and the estranged activate powerful unconscious processes. In individuals and in groups, an unraveling of established structures inevitably unleashes reactionary archetypal forces. We will view the constructive and destructive responses to our changing world as polarities stemming from the outsider archetype, the archetype organizing the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and psychic transformation.

Workshop: Encounters at the Border of Our Belonging

We all need to belong and we all know what it is to exclude and to suffer exclusion. Through dream, memory, visual art and group process we will explore the dynamics of belonging and exclusion and bring related attitudes and behaviors to our conscious attention. We will discover how the body, like dream and fantasy, can awaken us to unconscious individual and group responses to those outside the bounds of our belonging.  Most importantly, we will experience the transformative aspect of the outsider archetype through sacred image and story, opening ourselves to the presence of the Divine in the guise of the stranger.

Saturday Workshop Participants, please make note of our new time frame:

we are experimenting with a half-hour sack lunch discussion on-site instead

of our usual 90 minute off-site break.  Please bring your lunch.

MELANIE STARR COSTELLO, Ph.D., is a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst in private practice in Washington, D.C. She earned her doctorate in the History and Literature of Religions from Northwestern University. A former Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Dr. Costello has taught and published on the topics of psychology and religion, medieval spirituality, and clinical practice. Her book, Imagination, Illness and Injury: Jungian Psychology and the Somatic Dimensions of Perception was published in 2006 by Routledge Press.

   
This experiential weekend will support exploration of the creative potential within the shadow.  Using elements from Marion Woodman’s BodySoul Rhythms approach and “embodied active imagination” with it roots in the work of C. G. Jung, we will endeavor to open to the unlived life.  Informed by their backgrounds in dance, theater, Jungian and Somatic Psychology, the presenters will also draw from their extensive training and teaching with Marion Woodman.

Friday the presenters will discuss Jung’s concepts of the shadow, particularly in relationship to energies in the body.  Clinical material will illustrate and amplify body/psyche connections.  Saturday offers an opportunity to explore the work experientially, deepening our connection to mind and body.  Such work supports the reawakening of resonant consciousness in our cells, invites the play of imagination, and promotes integration through movement and voice, enhanced by music and art.
Authentic movement is a gentle, natural means to nurture oneself, connect with buried energies, and unfold one’s inner dance. Simple exercises in freeing the voice involve relaxation, breath, and sound to help release one’s authentic voice. These creative processes do not involve performance, and are attuned to the needs of the individual. Come explore “Jung embodied” through these gateways to the unconscious. 

Saturday Workshop Participants, please make note of our new time frame:

we are experimenting with a half-hour sack lunch discussion on-site instead

of our usual 90 minute off-site break.  Please bring your lunch.

TINA STROMSTED, Ph.D., MFT, ADTR, is a Jungian analyst and dance therapist with a private practice in San Francisco.  With more that thirty years of clinical experience, Dr. Stromsted leads workshops in the U.S, and internationally, integrating body-oriented, Jungian and creative arts therapy approaches to healing and transformation.  Past co-founder and faculty member of the Authentic Movement Institute, she teaches in the Somatic Psychology Doctoral Program at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and with Marion Woodman and her team. Her numerous articles and book chapters explore the integration of body, psyche and soul in clinical work. 

MEG WILBUR, MA, MFT, MFA, is a Jungian analyst, with a private practice in Los Angeles and the Central Coast of California.  She teaches with Marion Woodman and her team, and serves as a board member of the Woodman Foundation. Meg is a professor emerita in UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television where she taught acting and voice for the stage, and directed plays. She also taught at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and writes and directs her own productions, featuring poetry and fairy tales. She is a founding member and faculty of the C. G. Jung Study Center of Southern California and leads workshops in active imagination, dreams, and voice.  

Lecture

Apart from friends, family, and good work, what matters most in our lives?   What values lead us to a freer, larger life, a more considered course?  Together we will examine the crippling role fear management systems play in our choices, why we are called to choose ambiguity over familiarity, why the world is driven by verbs not nouns, how life is most meaningful in the face of mortality, and how genuine spirituality is a journey not an arrival.  A more considered life asks more of us than may be comfortable, but we are rewarded with a more interesting story.

Workshop

Saturday Workshop Participants, for this event we will break for an

hour and thirty minute lunch.  The workshop will end at 4 PM.

JAMES HOLLIS, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center of Houston, the co-founder of Philadelphia Jung Institute, and author of twelve books, the latest being, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding our Darker Selves. He graduated as an analyst from the Zurich Jung Institute in 1982. His other books include : The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning at Mid-Life, Under Saturn’s Shadow: the Wounding and Healing of Men, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life from Dismal Places, and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.

~Meet the new board members, honor our
volunteers, and
find out about next year’s speakers~

We will be holding a raffle as well as a silent auction of a gently used, paperback edition of The Collected Works by C.G. Jung.