Season: Spring 1988

The Child’s Quest for Meaning

Though they don’t often verbalize these things, young children seem to be searching for answers to the same questions with which adults are often concerned: What is the meaning of my life? Where is the meaning of my life?

Too often the making of meaning out of the external world with its over-emphasis on rationality, cause-and-effect, structuring and ordering which should be only one part of a child’s life-half a child’s developmental task, makes for a kind of denial of the inner world’s need for experiencing meaning. This experiencing of meaning when it is not being honored and allowed for in children can lead to psychic imbalance.

Sand play slides of children of many ages will be shown in this talk which will address this issue.

Jung and Nietzsche

Jung put off the reading of Nietzsche for years, apprehensive lest he and Nietzsche prove frighteningly alike. Finally, Jung got up his courage in his medical school days and plunged in. It was, he said, “a tremendous experience.” In 1934 he began a five-year seminar devoted to a psychological commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra; now he as able to analyze this complex man in detail, exposing alike his undoubted genius and the tendencies toward inflation that foreshadowed his psychic collapse at the age of forty-four. This lecture will reveal important respects in which Nietzsche was a pioneer in “the discovery of the Unconscious”, with particular reference to affinities between his philosophy and Jungian psychology.

Jung and Nietzsche

This workshop will begin with a fairly extensive exposition of Nietzsche’s principal philosophical and psychological ideas (as probably less well known to most participants than those of Jung). Attention will then focus upon Thus Spoke Zarathustra, considered by Nietzsche and many others the chief jewel in his crown. Several of Jung’s lectures, complete with discussion by the original group, will be examined in detail, particular notice being paid to the central topic of the seminar, the relation of ego to Self. Finally, Personality Types will come in for discussion, with emphasis upon the Intuitive, a function highly developed in both Nietzsche and Jung.

Passion and Irony in the Blues

The blues often portrays a process in which one engages passionate reality, especially as colored by such “negative” emotions as depression and anger, and survives the engagement without being seduced by false hope. This lecture, illustrated by taped musical examples, will be about the ways in which a characteristic irony and wit-the tragicomic art of the blues-can instruct us in emotional engagement and detachment.

You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had: The Life-Affirming Art of the Blues

The blues is a form of musical folk poetry, created by Black Americans around the turn of this century, and developed through various phases and styles to the present. This music has been one of the mainsprings of American popular culture, and some of its products are deep and intricate works of irresistible interest.

Many blues songs and performances are of great psychological concern, especially in their exploration of emotional states and in their elaboration of attitudes providing strategies for dealing with troubles of various kinds. Such psychological matters will be the focus of this seminar, which will survey the work of a number of blues artists from various regions and periods, from the beginning of this art form to the present day. Tapes of blues music will be played throughout the seminar.

You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had: The Life-Affirming Art of the Blues

The blues is a form of musical folk poetry, created by Black Americans around the turn of this century, and developed through various phases and styles to the present. This music has been one of the mainsprings of American popular culture, and some of its products are deep and intricate works of irrestistible interest.

Many blues songs and performances are of great psychological concern, especially in their exploration of emotional states and in their elaboration of attitudes providing strategies for dealing with troubles of various kinds. Such psychological matters will be the focus of this seminar, which will survey the work of a number of blues artists from various regions and periods, from the beginning of this art form to the present day. Tapes of blues music will be played throughout the seminar.

Phallos: The Archetypal Source of Masculinity

Up to recent times, the dominance of masculinity has been taken for granted due to the pre-eminence of patriarchy in social and psychological structures. No longer. The upsurge of feminine awareness requires both men and women to look anew at the basis of masculine presence in the psyche, one-half of Jung’s eternal syzygy.

Strangely, while psychoanalytic conceptualization has given priority to the Mother, psychoanalytical attitudes and procedures have often depended upon the dominance of patriarchy in thinking and procedure. Freud’s “penis envy” and Jung’s “hero’s journey” are examples of this. Neumann’s notion of “higher” and “lower” phallus are another.

The lecture will seek to establish Phallos, rather than the Mother, as the archetypal basis for masculinity. Only when a conscious understanding of Phallos as one-half of primal source emerges can the unconscious pressure to assert it as such diminish. Such an understanding establishes the authority of the masculine and at the same time removes from the feminine the burden for masculine development and well-being.

The “Iron John” Quality of Masculinity: Rough, Fierce, Wild

“Iron John” (“Hans”) is a Grimm’s fairy tale which deals with the quality of masculinity that is essentially opposite to the feminine, neither dependent nor derivative of it. The poet Robert Bly’s treatment of the Grimm tale in New Age magazine, “What Men Really Want”, will provide the point of departure for the workshop. (Upon registration, a reprint of this article will be sent to the regsitrant).

The problem addressed by Bly is the feminization of men. This is an issue especially important in a time of feminine empowerment. The fairy tale, however, is not a modern invention. Men have always needed a knowledge and feeling of themselves that is authentic to the phallic archetype…that does not emerge as only reaction to the feminine. How does roughness, fierceness, wildness live itself out in a male without damaging the feminine in himself or in the other?

The workshop depends upon input from the participants, who have reflected upon the Bly interview. It is recommended that each participant also read the fairy tale itself, only half of which is treated by Bly in his interview.

Like Jacob and the Angel: Jung’s Confrontation with Christianity

Jung, son of a Swiss pastor, wrestled all his life with religion and particularly with Christianity. He was convinced that humans are by nature religious, and that the issue of developing a solid religious attitude lay at the heart of psychological problems and growth, especially in the second half of life. He also believed that the psyche continually produces symbols for the otherwise unknowable mystery, and that such symbols have become the focus of religious life and the source of great energy for peoples throughout history. These symbols are not “invented” by human thought, nor are they (in Jung’s view) reducible to images derived from nature or designed to compensate for human frailties and fears. They arise from the autonomous workings of the collective psyche, similar symbols often emerging in very different cultures or periods of time. Not uncommonly they become transmuted into systems of doctrine and worship and into religious institutions, within which the archetypal symbols may retain-or may lose-their original psychic power, and they may or may not serve as carriers of deep religious experience for future generations.

Like Jacob and the Angel: Jung’s Evolving Position on Christian Thought: The Intellectual and Religious Context and Growing Convictions Concerning Archetypal Symbols

In relation to Christianity, Jung’s position evolved during his lifetime, the evolution being affected by both his own developing inner experience and by historical events in the west, especially the two world wars and all that surrounded them. He had immense respect for the psychic depth of historic Christian symbolism; he had little respect for effort by the churches to turn the symbolic power into literal and rigid dogma; he had indeed little respect for literalism of any kind, nor for efforts to set aside the great symbols in search of acceptable liberal thought or modernity. He had, further, some profound misgivings about some areas of Christian thought and belief, especially those dealing with evil, and with the feminine.

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