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The Tao of Story: From Dracula to Bodhisattva
April 14, 2000 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm PDT
Stories inspire and shape our lives, from the archetypal dramas we unconsciously enact, to the jokes we make about the boss at work. Yet stories also plague us, and this weekend’s lecture and workshop will focus on four such problematic situations.
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.
Related Workshop: The Tao of Story: From Dracula to Bodhisattva - Exploring the Myths, Fairy Tales, Legends, and Favorite Stories by Which We Live
Allan B. Chinen, M.D., is the author of four books and the psychological and spiritual tasks of aging: In the Ever After, Once Upon a Midlife, Beyond the Hero, and Waking the World. Although retired from private practice to focus on writing, he continues to teach as a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, on the voluntary faculty of the School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. He Is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Born and raised in Hawaii, he obtained his undergraduate and medical degrees at Stanford University, and completed his psychiatry residency and fellowship at University of California, San Francisco.