Film as a medium is a resevoir of unconscious imagery. The work of great masters of the medium can be compared to alchemy, in which the search for commercial gold becomes transformed by a spiritual subtext of urgent creative autobiography that reveals a process of individuation. Alongside the story and day-residues of popular culture that we have grown used to finding in film, archetypal imagery makes its unexpected appearance. In this lecture, Dr. Beebe will show how this active imaginal process is alive in the movies of our leading contemporary filmmakers and will tell us how to look for it.
Season: Fall 1989
The Mythic World of the Post-Modern Film
“Reading” a post-modern film is not easy for those brought up on modern cinema. The content is often disturbing and the style is frequently strange. New kinds of protagonists have replaced the familiar hero and survivor figures, and familiar conventions of film narration are continually being challenged. Yet often there is a gripping intensity to the stories that are told in this new way. Among recent attempts to establish this new film style, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet stands out as a genuine mythic achievement. This is a complex work of art that records the emergence of new archetypal solutions to the problems left by the modern era.
After the special showing of the film, Dr. Beebe will conduct an inquiry into its imagery, which probes the deep wounds that modern culture and the myth of the hero that informs it have left for post-modern men and women to resolve.
Relationship in the First Half of Life
15th Anniversary Program
Relationship Between Men and Women: Is it Possible?
Body Work with Marion Woodman
Dialogue – James Hillman and Marion Woodman
Individuation and the Scapegoat
The tension between self and group development can be profoundly creative or sorely destructive. Using examples from the Bible, William James, Ursula LeGuin and analytic and consultive practice, this lecture will consider how individuals may participate in unconscious collective scapegoating processes which undermine self development while creating social injustice and pain and suffering in others.
Individuation and the Scapegoat
The seminar will explore selected topics of the lecture in greater detail. Dr. Colman is particularly interested in considering examples of the scapegoat processes in our personal, family, and work lives, concentrating on how these experiences have either become integrated or split off from the individual and group psyche. He will also explore methods of praxis and interpretation that have proved useful in aiding those possessed by the scapegoat to return to themselves and the community.
The Archetype of the Father
More than 2500 years of one-sided male family role-Patriarchy based on the Syzyzgy of Sky Father and Earth Mother-are beginning to crumble in response to the revolution in the collective female consciousness. The unconscious, eternally creative, is manifesting new and ancient images of the Archetype of the Father which we will explore through myth and clinical material.
Closeness
Distance-Closeness-the ethics, attachemnt, loss, transference, countertransferance, touching, intimacy, and sex: what are the aspects of these issues in the perspectives of organizational psychology, interpersonal psychoanalytical dynamics, communication dynamics and analytical psychology.
Pre-reading Practical Jung, particularly on transference, countertranference, love, and the wounded healer.
Experiential Dream Adventure
Dr. Wilmer will work with a few dreams from the people who attend, using a group technique which he created for psychiatric residents, psychology residents, as well as social workers and therapists and with his patients. It is a new way of looking at the creative unconscious and the archetypal world in a way which any intelligent person can grasp.