Season: Fall 2007

The power of Eros can take us to ecstatic heights, but also to the depths of despair. We experience this power whenever we fall in love or whenever longing for another overtakes us. As long as we remain unaware that the ideal image of the beloved is a projection of our own psychic content, and the more our longing for wholeness is confused with the external satisfaction of erotic fantasies, the more we can get lost in compulsive longing, destructive relationships and sexual addictions. Understanding the archetype of Eros can help us develop a sense of how Eros can become destructively connected with addiction. We will seek to understand the nature of Eros and erotic longing in both its sensual and spiritual aspects.

The “heartbeat” of DreamTending, Dr. Aizenstat’s orientation to dreams, is the recognition that dream images are alive. In his Friday night lecture, he will describe his unique approach to dream work and invite us to experience dream images as living, embodied beings — engaged in their activity, not ours alone. DreamTending will be introduced as a system of healing, useful in working with the afflictions of personal life as well as the conditions of the world soul, the anima mundi. Examples and elaborations will be offered.

It is well known that self-disclosure in journals and autobiography in general promotes emotional and physical health. On Friday evening, Dr. Rosen will illustrate the healing value of writing a personal narrative in the form of autobiography with a single case-study: himself. He will demonstrate the process of writing a memoir as a “haibun”-a combination of prose and haiku about his life-long pilgrimage to the center of profound mystery. His own autobiography (presented as an inner and outer journey based on his life-review, an analysis of interviews with family and friends, as well as dreams and experiences recorded in journals since his eighteenth year) emerged as a painful yet healing experience. When such a review is carried out in an honest and thorough way, one’s lost soul can find its way home. As the Zen writer Matsuo Basho revealed: “Each day is a journey and the journey itself home,” an insight echoed by Soen Nakagawa Roshi: “If you cannot return home, your self is not your true self.”

The deeper layers of our psyches are constantly communicating with us via symbols. Amid the demands of everyday life we may notice this only in passing, usually first giving it our attention after a dream presents us with particularly enigmatic images and we wonder what it might mean. This program is offered as a small retreat where we will take the opportunity to look at symbolic process, the basis of Jung’s work.

The Friday lecture will start with a profound 28-minute film in which Yo-Yo Ma introduces his friend David Blum, also a professional musician. David explains how, when he left the security of his preferred language of expression, music, and dared to pick up some children’s pastels to draw scenes from his dreams, he unwittingly engaged in conversation with his inner self. We follow him as he shows us his pictures and talks movingly about his own skepticism, shyness, curiosity and wonder, and the unexpected reward of finding a layer of rich meaning in his colorful, naïvely-styled pictures. In our discussion of this moving account, we will review Jung’s ideas about symbolic images, and include some of the newer findings from brain scans, which unite cognition and emotion.