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The Religious Impulse: Encounters with Psyche in a Polarized World
May 15 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
Many of us experience our world as fragmented and polarizing. This causes tremendous anxiety as we struggle to find something reliable to believe in, to invest in and to trust. The Religious Impulse is a natural drive within every human psyche. Regardless of the existence of any external religious affiliation, this natural impulse is always actively on the search for transcendence and meaning. Without a functioning religious instinct, meaning evaporates. Without meaning, the suffering of the soul becomes unlimited and unbearable.
“…Among all my patients in the second half of life…every one of them fell ill because (they) had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain (their) religious outlook. – Jung (1932) Collected Works 11, ¶509.
A functioning religious attitude is one that manages to remain open to the sacredness and numinosity of reality as it presents itself to us intra-psychically, interpersonally and on the transpersonal level. But we often find ourselves split between the quest for stable fundamental certainty and the opposite longing for self-expansion and development. A common coping strategy for this essential conflict occurs in the form of doctrinal beliefs or political ideology, where one finds a defensive way to reinforce their own one-sided attitude. We can see this play out in every level of political discourse (including within our own minds).
Please join us for this presentation as we explore this timely collection of dynamics and their antidotes in hopes of making the essential move from reactionary discharge to witnessed polarization to conscious differentiation and finally toward potential integration.
Related Workshop: Fuga ex Vulnere: Political Ideology As A Flight From The Wound That Will Not Heal
Joel Kroeker, RCC-ACS, MMT, is a Swiss-trained Jungian psychoanalyst, clinical supervisor, and author with a private practice based in Victoria, BC. Drawing on over 25 years of diverse experience Joel devotes part of his practice to training and supervising international practitioners in his original modality of Archetypal Music Psychotherapy across North and South America, China and parts of Europe. He currently serves as a journal reviews editor for the Journal of Analytical Psychology and divides his time outside of clinical hours between parenting, musicking, teaching, and writing. His book, Jungian Music Psychotherapy: When Psyche Sings, is a finalist for the IAJS (International Association for Jungian Studies) book award.
