Season: Fall 2021

In the nearly 50 years since C. G. Jung died, great strides in understanding of whole systems have occurred.  It is now time to apply a holistic/systemic approach to a Jung’s model of the psyche with the aim of contemporizing our views of the unconscious.  In particular, we will look at how ecological formulations offer richer, more complex models of the psyche, revealing a far more interconnected universe than previously imagined.   Examples of intelligences in nature will provide potential ways to explore layers of the unconscious not often taken into consideration. This will be augmented by recent studies on altered states of consciousness which have access to types of knowledge not readily accessible in other ways, with qualities similar to oracles from the ancient world, such as the Pythia at Delphi.

In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude – the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.

C.G. Jung, Civilization in Transition ( CW 10, para 325)

Understanding dreams is difficult. Understanding our own dreams sometimes seems almost impossible. Even for those who have studied dreams for many years, one’s own dreams can remain frustratingly opaque. Why is it so difficult to understand what the unconscious is trying to tell us, and how can we get better at hearing its messages to us? This weekend we will explore dream interpretation with the aim of making it easier for us to work with our own dreams. On Friday we’ll look at basic principles of Jungian dream work and learn techniques and skills that foster deepened understanding.

The absent father effect is a love story, but an unrequited one. Harm is done due to the presence of the father’s absence, affecting a daughter—and the father–in body, mind, and soul. The father is an essential aspect of the psyche and significant for the daughter’s psychological and physical life, personally and culturally. Topics of the psyche affected by the absent father include the negative father complex, puella archetype and the concept of the animus. The Friday talk will focus on the daughter- father  relationship in order to shed light on its lack, symptoms and problems, as well as begin to address its repair.

This special weekend program presents a radically different take on the meaning of the Persephone myth. It comes out of an imaginative perspective that mixes Australian desert experience with old Mediterranean folklore and the harsh, confusing anxieties we face today around war, climate and our environment. Through performance and presentation, visuals, discussion and reflection, we will explore this psycho-mythological perspective.

In Persephone’s Heart Craig and Miriam recount the story of how and why an original creation force of nature became humanized as the daughter of Demeter/Gaia. Persephone needs to know how humans feel, and she undertakes a painful journey of becoming human, falling in love with Aidos, and bearing children. Only then can she return to her mother Demeter, where they initiate the Eleusinian Mysteries of death/rebirth. The play draws upon understandings of both European and Australian creation stories and how mythic beings assume human/animal form and incarnate as geographic sites.

Writing from his own experience of working with Australian Indigenous communities, San Roque links the devastating consequences of colonization on Australia’s traditional owners and their country to “the psychosis of the time” which “keeps one eye open and shuts the other.” San Roque identifies Jung’s Red Book visioning as Biblical and Northern European in heritage, before exploring his own hybrid visioning combining this same heritage with his knowledge and experience of Indigenous Australian literature, song cycles and practices. He asks himself “what unconscious fantasy drives my response to climate change anxiety?” His response emerges in stories – mythic and present time – of care for country, alive even in the midst of climate catastrophes, and an active imagination in the form of a community theatre work entitled ‘Persephone’s Wake’. This is a cathartic lament, full of anger, confusion, despair and love, which takes San Roque and his audience deep into a world where the old seasonal cycles celebrated in the ancient Near Eastern myths of Persephone and Demeter and Inanna can no longer operate, and Persephone dies from exhaustion, mourned by her children Kore and Kouros. The central question that surfaces through this, is the same as the one Jung responded to in The Red Book, “Will you accept this destruction?”