Season: Fall 2009

With the advent of the Aquarian age, a growing number of individuals are turning inward in their search for a meaningful connection to the mystery of life.  This evolution of consciousness was brought home to our presenter when, several decades ago, she read  a letter from the Spirit River Dream Analysis and Research Center located in a tiny settlement in the Peace River Country of central Canada requesting an affiliation with the C.G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles.  Dr. Sanford and her analyst husband answered the call, and journeyed to this remote community to present lectures and films.

Among this small group of pioneering souls, one woman’s psychic commitment, as evidenced in her paintings and dialogues, stood out.  Dr. Sanford kept in touch with this woman over the course of her life, and tonight she presents her friend’s art and writing as a testament to the power of the inner connection to psyche that enriched her friend’s life and supported her journey toward death.

Lara Newton lays the foundation for a new psychological perspective on the brother-sister relationship.  She explores that relationship in all its variety, both externally in the world of interpersonal and cultural relationships and internally in the relationship between conscious and unconscious, and masculine and feminine.

In this lecture, based on a book she worked on for over a decade, Lara will present the process of transformation from bonding to wounding and finally to healing and redemption. This transformation process takes the brother-sister relationship from an outer experience, whether negative or positive, to a powerful intrapsychic reality, for any individual who takes up the challenge of relating to this psychological phenomenon.  In the course of the evening, Lara will also share some poetic material and brother-sister stories that inspired her.

Lara writes in her book, Brothers and Sisters: Discovering the Psychology of Companionship, “Brother and sister point the way toward a new understanding of companionship and mutuality because first and foremost, they are companions… At this point in history, we must remember that there is power, not only in conflict and discord, but also in harmony and equanimity.”  In a spirit of companionship, Lara shares her insights and welcomes discussion with her sister (and brother) Jungian community in Portland.

Jung’s work is founded on a belief in the reality of the psyche rather than on a reductionist point-of-view. Yet we may also wonder how his theories about the nature of unconscious communication, self-regulation, and active imagination jibe with new and fascinating studies coming from the field of neurobiology.

We will begin with images of the King and Queen from “Psychology of the Transference” and from the Splendor Solis, as examples of Jung’s use of imagery, which can communicate emotions and ideas that cannot be easily put into words.   We will then compare Jung’s method to Darwin’s early work on emotional communication through body language and facial expression and to contemporary research, which employs neuro-imagining techniques to study nonverbal cues that can trigger an emotional response in another person, both before and sometimes without any conscious awareness.   Participants can expect to come away with a basic understanding of nonverbal communication, which underlies much of what we talk about when we speak of unconscious-to-unconscious communication in psychotherapy and in everyday life.

Jung described the process of individuation as the curiosity about and understanding of the autonomous, unconscious psyche.  Curiosity is the trait that allows us to follow the red thread of the otherwise mysterious symbols as they emerge from the impersonal and personal unconscious.  However the unconscious is barred from our direct perception and so appears to us in many ways — in symptoms, in our bodies, in relationships, in emotion, in personal insight, as well as through collective symbols.

This weekend, we will explore and practice Jung’s most important tools for translating communications from the unconscious.   We will take a new look at amplification as a very precise technique, and add to it the orientational method Jung developed in Volume 12; Psychology and Alchemy. Although we can use these tools to look at any symbolic communication from film to astrophysical theory to psychotic ideation, we will look specifically at dreams.

Although there are many sources from which to derive Jung’s method, it is only with the publishing of Jung’s seminars that we see his teaching style and the method itself with dramatic clarity.  We are fortunate that Jung’s latest volume, Children’s Dreams, gives us just such clarity. In this work Jung shows us that some dreams reveal the arc of fate contained within the most determinative personal images – determinative not because we had them as children but because we remember them 30 or 40 years later (the dreams in this volume are not the dreams of children but the dreams remembered by adults from their childhood).

Dream images remembered from childhood are similar to collective symbols in that they come to us without relevant associations.  The seminar will reveal how Jung interpreted these images without the help of surrounding personal material.  Because of the sensitivity of this method, Jung taught it to his inner circle but barred this material from publication for many years because it shows his work in a different light than in many of the other volumes.  It is a great boon to us, however, for here we can observe Jung’s uniquely direct style of teaching as he explains how to decipher the language of dreams and outlines the value of amplification.

We will introduce this particularly powerful method of symbolic translation during the lecture and then have a chance to practice it in more detail during the workshop.  We will also consider Jung’s radical concept of changing fate, or heimarmene, through psychological development.