Season: Spring 1991

By looking at animals as they appear in our dreams (through information from analytical psychology, myth and religion) we are provided with a window through which we can glimpse something deep within the instinctive-body-matter aspect of an individual’s psyche. We also glimpse the aspects of nature by which we know the inter-connectedness of all things. The animal can connect us to the instinctive level, but it is a mistake to simply interpret all animals as instincts without respect for the amazing, mysterious specificity within the psyche of choosing precisely the image required.

Inseeing is a term used by Ranier Marie Rilke to describe that exact moment in creation when God knew that each creature was perfect just as it was. By inseeing into the images of the animals in our dreams, perhaps we can better understand what they can tell us.

An authentic religious experience is both an awesome and a potentially fragmenting experience that challenges the very structure of our personality. When accepted, contact with the numinosum may lead to transformation. Such contect may, however, instill terror and activate defense mechanisms. Dr. Corbett will discuss examples of religious experience, the ways they may or may not be healing, and the ways in which our own vulnerabilities and narcissistic defenses prevent us from experiencing their transforming power.

This workshop will review the many different ways in which Jung used the terms anima and animus, and will discuss the controversy these terms have inspired. We will explain why we believe that anima and animus actually describe particular intrapsychic functions, which are best understood as the operation of soul and spirit. This useage allows these functions to be separated from their historical association with contrasexuality, thereby freeing them from sexist bias.

When Dr. Lavin presented his Depth Psychology of Alcoholism lectures here in Portland in 1986, he talked about Jung’s understanding that a person who lost contact with her or his inner creative spirit often went on to abuse alcoholic spirits in order to get high and warm again.

In this lecture series, Dr. Lavin will discuss the many forms of spirit and the ways in which twelve-step programs support the rediscovery of the creative spirit both within and without. In their best form, twelve-step programs are meeting places and containers for the ecstasy of Youth and wisdom of the Wise Old Woman and Old Man.

The lecture and workshop will discuss sobriety as a process of remembering one’s Self by loving the body, finding the soul, and accepting the embrace of one’s creative spirit. To grow in sobriety means letting go of dependence and co-dependence and walking a path which liberates the heart.

Handed down over centuries, fairy tales are treasuries of wisdom distilling the observations and reflections of countless generations. In most familiar stories, like “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” the protagonist is a child or adolescent. These tales emphasize the psychological tasks of youth and end when the hero and heroine marry and (supposedly!) live “happily ever after.”

A unique group of fairy tales feature protagonists who are in the second-half of life. These “elder tales” reveal what really happens in the “ever after”-when the Prince becomes bald and the Princess dons bifocals.

In this lecture and workshop a number of “elder tales” from around the world will be retold and discussed. The stories contain deep insights about the tasks of maturity, from self-reformation and self-transcendence, to helping the next generation and being open to magic. In charming and poignant dramas, the tales depcit the final quest in life-for wisdom and illumination.

“On the one hand, emotion is the chemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes…But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.”
C.G. Jung

For Jung, the emotions are the foundations of the psyche. The highest aspirations of the human spirit have evolved and are developed from them. An emotion is at once somatic (bodily innervations, expressive physical action) and psychic (images and ideas). Active imagination, Jung’s analytical method of psychotherapy, is intricately interwoven with the expression and transformation of the emotions.

A differentiated understanding of the emotions is of great value to both analyst and analysand. We can train ourselves to recognize the fundamental emotions. One of the most useful approaches is through the study of the prototypical expressive actions. Darwin was the first to differentiate between the fundamental emotions, the complex emotions, and the symbolic cultural gestures. This lecture will take up the fudnamental emotions, with particular attention to universal patterns of expressive behavior. This material is drawn from experiences in dance, dance therapy, and analysis, as well as the contributions of Darwin, Jung, Henderson, Tomkins, and Stewart.