Almost everyone participates in work groups and organizations. Often more time and energy is spent in these contexts than anywhere else. Individuals can be wounded by the power of organizations and the organizational unconscious. The question is how to grow and benefit from these involvements. The individual person’s unconscious and the unconscious of the organization intermesh, and the individual projects onto the organization as the organization also projects onto the individual. Archetypal roles are assigned and taken up, or resisted and fought. Conflicts arise around misperceptions and misguided ambitions and longings. The psychological task for both individual and organization is to become conscious of these dynamics and to use them for further development. In the lecture, Dr. Stein will apply Jungian theory and the alchemical model to psyche in the workplace.
Season: Fall 1998
Practicing Wholeness
Wholeness is the goal of Jungian analysis. Indeed it is the psychological goal of life itself. It is also something that one must practice daily and in many ways. This workshop/seminar will be based on Murray Stein’s book Practicing Wholeness and will also focus on:
- Human nature and the practice of wholeness
- Wholeness and the shadow
- Dream work and active imagination
- Relationships in depth
The format of the workshop will be lecture, discussion, and experimental exercises.
Celtic Otherworld Journeys
The ancient Irish, Welsh, and Scots storytellers left us a rich collection of myths dealing with the relations between the interpenetrating realms of nature and the supernatural. One category of their art deals with the journeys that adventurers, kings, and pilgrims make into the timeless Otherworld of the Land of Promise, what we would call the world of archetypal form. Reflecting on some of these can provide clues to the initiatory ordeals that modern individuals may encounter when they confront unconscious forces on the long path of individuation. We will see that our blessing and pathologies find echoes in the rewards and stumblings of our ancestors.
Rites of the Celtic Cult of Sacred Waters
The Celts believed that Otherworld powers are available to us when we journey to healing wellsprings and carry out the ancient rituals that attune us to the source. These rites are analogous to the therapeutic journey of Jungian psychanalysis. We will consider the eightfold steps and how they may apply to the healing of our own complexes. Bring your memories, imagination, a notebook for journaling, and a pebble.
Australian Aboriginal Dreaming: How It Works and What it Has to Teach Us
You may be familiar with the concept of the Australian Aboriginal Dreaming or creation stories through Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Song Lines, or through Australian Aboriginal art works or popular films and novels which convey something of the mystery and exoticism of Aboriginal Culture. This illustrated lecture will help introduce people who live on the American continent to the way the Australian continent has been imagined and constructed (made) by the Aboriginal Creation ancestors. The Dreaming is a very pragmatic way of telling stories, encoding cultural and ecological knowledge and ensuring the physical and spiritual survival of the groups of nomadic peoples who inhabited Australia for tens of thousands of years. Craig San Roque will explain how the dreaming works and what the aboriginal creation stories have to teach contemporary peoples (of any culture). Drawing upon extensive on-the-ground experience in central Australia, upon friendships with Aboriginal people, and upon a Jungian psychological background, he will attempt to give as straightforward account as possible of what the dreaming is and what it is not. This will involve some demystification and also some stories on intercultural ethics
“Dead Drunk, Good God”: The Myth of Dionysus as a Basis for Understanding and Dealing With Substance Abuse
This workshop will continue from the basis of an understanding of how ancient aboriginal creation stories work, but take it into the European domain by introducing participants to the way ancient European creation stories operate in ways similar to the aboriginal. This will include showing a video performance and documentary video of The Sugarman Project, a retelling in Central Australia of the ancient Greek Dionysos epic in terms of contemporary cultural dismemberment and alcohol and drug intoxication and recovery. Craig will show how the European story is helping Aboriginal people to come to grips mentally with the impact of alcohol, but carry the paradigm further to show how Dionysos as a “dreaming story” has potential especially for use as a participatory initiation drama for young people of Australia or even America. He wishes to invite you to consider that we may have available to us a tool which can help handle both the creative and destructive sides of intoxication, by a radical new interpretation of our own cultural source material, in much the same way as the aboriginal people rely upon their creation stories for survival. The workshop will include a showing of the video, a display of paintings made for the project, and some rehearsal workshop performance of selected parts of the Dionysos/Sugarman script.
The Maiden King: The Triumph of the Feminine
Robert Bly and Marion Woodman interpret the deep psychological insights imbedded in ancient stories, in this case a Russian folktale about bringing feminine energy back into the world. The Maiden King tells of an absent father, a possessive stepmother, a false tutor, and a young man overwhelmed by a beautiful maiden and her thirty sisters, sailing toward him on thirty boats. His weak response sends her retreating in anger, and to find her once again he must go on a quest that leads to Baba Yaga, the fierce old woman of Russian folk tradition who represents not life in service of death, but death in service of life. The male tendency to go to sleep in the face of feminine magnificence, female fear of power and of abandonment that leads to rage, the need to get beyond oppositional thinking enroute to the Divine – these are issues the book addresses with wisdom and lyrical beauty. The true heir to Iron John, Bly’s number-one national best-seller about men, The Maiden Kingspeaks eloquently to readers of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, James Hillman, and Deborah Tannen.
This program is a joint presentation of the Oregon Friends of C.G. Jung and Looking Glass Bookstore.
Cin-Imago Dei: Images of Soul in Contemporary Film
What is the Soul? Where is the Soul? How do you discover Soul? Or “make” Soul? Is it possible to lose the Soul? Does the Soul have any special relationship with the body or the earth?
These perceptual theological questions will be explored through the lens of contemporary cinema and Jungian psychology. If cinema is the most attended modern Synagogue/Mosque/Cathedral-of-Presence and depth psychology its contemporary therapeut and liturgist, then this discussion is long overdue. This seminar proposes no solutions to these questions but promises a lively exploration of them through the multitudinous images of the soul in modern film.
Cin-Imago Dei: Images of Soul in Contemporary Film
What is the Soul? Where is the Soul? How do you discover Soul? Or “make” Soul? Is it possible to lose the Soul? Does the Soul have any special relationship with the body or the earth?
These perceptual theological questions will be explored through the lens of contemporary cinema and Jungian psychology. If cinema is the most attended modern Synagogue/Mosque/Cathedral-of-Presence and depth psychology its contemporary therapeut and liturgist, then this discussion is long overdue. This seminar proposes no solutions to these questions but promises a lively exploration of them through the multitudinous images of the soul in modern film.