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While picking flowers, a young woman is raped and abducted away from the familiar world of her mother to the ghostly world of Hades, Lord of the Underworld. This splitting of the Mother and Daughter archetype is the crux of an ancient myth that holds as much meaning and healing for us today as it did for people in ancient times. The abducted young woman was the Greek goddess Kore, later known as Persephone, Queen of the Dead, and her mother was Demeter, the grain goddess. The story of how Kore becomes Persephone and is ransomed back from Death to Life by her Mother has many meanings. It depicts an experience all too familiar to us — ‘going under’ to the shadow side of patriarchal power, a ravaging that occurs not only between and within men and women today but even between nations. But it also offers hope in the face of these ‘goings to hell’; it shows us an archetypal Feminine force that is stronger than patriarchy and can transform and redeem it, a force that meets the forces of Death with an unabashed passion for Life as well as the power to gestate and transform the death experience. Using slides of beautiful ancient Greek art, Kathie’s lecture will tell the story of the grain goddess Demeter and Her daughter Persephone as well as overview some of its myriad meanings for us today.

Five thousand years ago, vital Egyptian minds were expressing humankind’s concerns about the know, the unknown, and the unknowable. Just as we do, they confronted tensions between order and chaos, and sought balance between harmony and tension, attraction and aggression, good and evil, life and death, light and dark, mortal time and a timeless eternal. The great conceptions of Egyptian myth, such as Hathor, Maat, and Thoth, reached toward the comprehensive understanding which gives breadth and depth to our interface with the universe. The story of Isis and Osiris dramatizes the intra-psychic struggles, interpersonal intensities, and transformative possibilities of a depth connection to experience. Using Egyptian images and texts, this seminar offers a glimpse into the resonance between the Egyptian sensibility and the Jungian understanding of the inclusive life.

The engaged and considered life demands many beginnings. The multiple creation myths of the most mindful of peoples, the ancient Egyptians, not only addressed their questions about the origins and nature of the universe and human life, but offered stirring images for the first and continuous emergences of physical awareness, psychic consciousness, creative reflection and expression. Images similar to those we will view and discuss from Egyptian art and myth often appear in the dreams of modern women and men in moments of inner pressure and outer crisis, when growth, restoration and renewal are essential for on-going life.

C.G. Jung’s theory of psychological life was both revolutionary. His ideas, especially concerning the nature of the unconscious and symbols, radically differed from Freud’s, and his concept of individuation was imagined as a process of continually becoming one’s self rather than achieving a one-and-for-all state of being.Jung asserted and demonstrated that the ego could actively participate in this becoming by

For Jung,

In interpreting dreams, we are in a field of relativity berween our conscious and unconscious. When an image appears in a dream, it emerges out of a process, and furthers a process. Psyche speaks to and about itself and also reflects and interacts with the world through itself. This lecture explore sthe field of our dreams.

The workshop will include an experimental portion; participants will explore their own responses in imagery and in response to music.

What is the importance and significance of sound and music to analytic work? In dialogue with the theories of Jung, Kohut and Bonny, we will explore the use of music as a therapeutic modality, relating it to active imagination and to clinical and symbolic aspects of music and the psychotherapeutic process. The lecture will include music.

Dr. Conforti will present his own findings on the nature of archetypal influences in order to illustrate the effect that hey have in virtually every aspect of the life process. Building on Jung’s original work on the nature of the archetype, on more recent findings in the new sciences (including those of David Bohm, Ervin Laszlo, David Peat and Rupert Sheldrake) and on clinical material, he will show that our basic life interactions, including personal realtionships, financial decisions, work situaltions, and even the therapeutic realtionship, are governed by the influence of these archetypal fields. In learning to recognize the underlying structure of these patterns, we can often infer the nature of the specific archetype constellated.

One of Jung’s greatest discoveries was the presence of Self organizing tendencies in the psyche. He realized that, manifested in dreams, symptoms, and in other symbolic form, the psyche continually introduces greater degrees of meaning and complexity into the life process. Jung went on to suggest that much of life presents an unfolding of these archetypal. ordering processesinto matter, which then assumes a recognizable form in both the internal and external world.