Season: Spring 2004

According to Jung’s theory of psychological types, it is our birthright to differentiate, in the course of individuation, four function-attitudes that together define the wholeness of our mature standpoint.  But Jung has postulated a possible eight functions of consciousness. What about the four functions that remain in shadow? How do they operate, and what is their role in our development as human beings? In this lecture, illustrated with clips from popular films, Dr. John Beebe will help us identify the different archetypal characteristics of our shadow functions and will show how they go about their work of challenging, undermining, and defending the ego.

The religions and myths of many times and cultures tell us that the human soul’s deepest desire is its longing for God.  Even people who feel disillusioned with traditional religions or disenchanted with spiritual teachers still yearn for something transcendent.

Whenever we long for the transcendent, however, forces from the deep unconscious also swing into play.  Walking a spiritual path not only evokes states of illumination; it challenges us to face the darkness within ourselves.

In this lecture and workshop, Dr. Wittine will explore spiritual longing and its shadow. Spiritual longing might overwhelm the ego, cover over wounded parts of the personality, perpetuate our inner critic, lead to a split between “higher” and “lower” self-needs, and derail individuation. We might project our longing onto lovers and teachers, onto food, sex, and drugs, or find it hidden in our grandiosity and desire for power. Dr. Wittine concludes that if we internalize our longing rather than externalizing it onto images, people, and things, it will guide us toward a new experience of God, which recognizes the transcendent in all aspects of life.

Until the mid-19th century, melancholy was imagined as a sacred affliction from the gods, a madness characteristic of genius and the most difficult and complex temperament.  At the height of the Renaissance, it was imagined in personified form as a majestic female figure; artists and poets looked to her as their Muse.  But, in the twentieth century, melancholy all but disappeared from the professional imagination, to be replaced by the diagnostic categories of depression.  Where did Melancholy go?  How did she lose her voice?  How can we call her into life again, listen to her wisdom, take new creative heart from within her depths?  This lecture/slide presentation will use both spoken word and photographs to re-discover Melancholy as Muse.

In Western Thought, the hero, the mythic expression of ego-development, expands consciousness by subduing the dragon , i.e. the “chaos” sensed by ego-consciousness in the categories of nature, instinct, mother. In this program we will explore the idea that while Jung initially abided by this traditional fantasy of ego-development, there is a persistent dimension in his work that recognized the implications of consciousness becoming encapsulated in the ego-complex; this obliged Jung to accentuate the actions in the psyche that strive toward a post-ego mythology.

Though nowadays consumed as a fashionable expression of a classic hero myth, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings , exposes the perplexing failure of the hero to effect psychic transformation in the contemporary ‘postmodern’ psyche. This incapacity, ironically present as the hero’s triumph, or, in psychological terms the pinnacle of ego-development, signifies, in Tolkien, a threat to “middle earth”, an unprecedented waning of the mythopoeic factor of the psyche. The claim is that the hero, through this deconstruction, presently, leads not, as it once had, into progressive states of originality, but into regressive states of compliance. This is manifest politically as globalization, and in current psychopathology as an “empty” depression, both of which are instinctively felt as a distance from “mother”. I take these to be the abiding concern of Jung’s analytical psychology, and Tolkein’s Trilogy; taken together they inform a radical rereading of the developmental psychology and heroic mythology that dominantly impose upon the current practice of psychotherapy.

This lecture will look at the nature of the emotions as they have evolved and continue to develop, from the primal, untransformed depths toward the highest values of human culture. The tendency in recent decades toward deconstruction of values may potentiate a compensatory development as individuals in many walks of life seek a differentiated experience of affects and their symbolic expression, shaped by eternal ideals that appear to be wired into the psyche.  Lecture includes slides to illustrate.