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The I Ching: The Imagination of Integrity
December 3, 2011 @ 10:00 am - 3:00 pm PST
Analytical psychology, with its emphasis on intuitive images, has frequently recorded the way a particularly arresting inner image can foster healing. Comparing the psychotherapist’s work to that of the Renaissance alchemist, similarly engaged in promoting a process of transformation, Jung was fond of quoting the hermetic maxim, “For those who have the image, the passage is easy.” But how does a patient in psychotherapy “have” the image that has such a transformative effect on personality and behavior? John Beebe believes the image needs to be “achieved,” a process that involves heart and mind in submitting to the contours of the image, allowing it to communicate its pattern to our minds, which must then translate the image in an authentic way to us so that we come to live inside it. If we allow ourselves to become shaped by the image, rather than trying to shape it to our own ends, it will show us a new way to live. In this lecture, Dr. Beebe will draw on insights and images from classical Chinese philosophy, especially Taoist and Confucian understandings of integrity, and the Book of Transformations, the I Ching, to help us see and feel the dynamic potential of this process.
Related Lecture: Achieving the Image: Lessons from Chinese Philosophy
John Beebe, M.D., a past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, is a psychiatrist who specializes in psychotherapy. He is the author of Integrity in Depth and Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness. He is co-author, with Virginia Apperson, of The Presence of the Feminine in Film, and co-editor, with Ernst Falzeder, of The Question of Psychological Types. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he has written about psychological types for numerous books and journals. Beebe’s eight-function, eight-archetype model of type is widely studied and applied in the field. In addition, he has spearheaded a Jungian typological approach to the analysis of film.