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.