Season: Fall 2000

This presentation will cover: understanding depression and the quest for meaning, knowing suicide and its creative potential, and egocide and transformation (an innovative Jungian humanistic therapeutic paradigm). Egocide and transformation entails healing depressive and suicidal states through the creative technique of active imagination. In other words, the symbolic death of a destructive ego (and shadow) — ‘the false self’ — and the subsequent creative expressions lead to the birth of the ‘true self.’ Dr. Rosen will also talk about crisis points (such as adolescence, mid-life, divorce and loss of a loved one) and how egocide can help.

George Bush, the elder, did not have in mind the fundamental interconnectedness of myth, politics and psyche when he inadvertently coined the phrase “the vision thing.” Yet, the very awkwardness of Bush’s phrase points to the inherent tension between the real and the visionary between the conscious and unconscious. Indeed, the “vision thing” problem is at the heart of ongoing paradoxes in our individual and collective lives and in our mythological and political orientations. This lecture will explore the “vision thing” through examples from contemporary American and international political conflicts.

The metaphor of the cave that one enters bearing only the modest candle of one’s intention to light the unknown depths and darkness is a very apt image of the exploration of self. With that image in mind, this lecture will retrace a recent pilgrimage to the Dordogne region of southwestern France to explore prehistoric caves and rock shelters of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon humans where painted images suggest early stages of mankind’s differentiation. We will also re-trace the traveling group’s visit to the great Cathedral at Chartres to experience another kind of “cave” made by men above the ground. These sites of exploration offer similar impressions of the perennial search in the deep places of the soul for, and the experience of, a transcendent Other. The lecture will discuss some of these cave sites and show slides of some of the surviving paintings. Using these images we will “go into the caves” together to examine the process of opening oneself to the personal depths of Psyche, to the experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. We will explore the psychological meanings of sacred space and the “thin places” in the world where the ego and Self, the human and the Divine, meet in fruitful exchange.

The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna wears on her robe “the carved-out ground plan of heaven and earth,” thus declaring herself to be the architect of perceived reality. Her plan, as described by the poet and priestess Enheduanna, encompasses both the beauty, joy and goodness of life as well as sorrow, tragedy, pain, violence and death. Inanna herself embodies paradox and creates for her human subjects all the difficult opposing forces of the outer and inner worlds. From Jung’s psychology we learn that the demanding contradictions that challenge every human being are the whet stones on which we hone our individuality and widen the circumference of our consciousness. We will explore transformative strategy of embracing dark and light, examining this process as a gateway to understanding the Divine Feminine.