Season: Spring 2008

In Friday night’s lecture, we will encounter what Jung called, in his later years, “the incalculable paradoxes of love.” Our single word “love” fails to adequately capture and express the powerful, often contradictory feelings that drive behavior and animate one’s soul. We will turn to the three Greek words for love (eros, philia, and agape) and explore the psychological distinctions they express. We will look at both the inter-personal and intra-psychic dynamics of love, as well as its light and dark sides. Finally, we will address the healing and wounding nature of this greatest of paradoxes.

Dr. Nash has taken much delight in this image of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God in Judaism, known as the Divine Presence (literally “indwelling”), that accompanied the joyous recognition of the power of the feminine principle. Such joy however was popularly accompanied by a naïve glorification of “her,” which twisted the dark side of the feminine into light, overlooking and casting out the realities of evil and the difficult path that leads to transformation through the hard work of integrating the shadow. In accord with Jung, the ancient Kabbalists painted a far more varied and intricate portrait of the feminine aspect of God, both light and dark – a spectrum of potencies ranging from creation to destruction, from loving sexual union to demonic possession.

The intense and compelling paintings of Frida Kahlo provide us with a rich context to begin an exploration of archetypal and developmental aspects of character structures.

Accompanied by numerous images of both Frida and her paintings, on Friday night Dr. West will address how Frida’s life and work may be seen as a remarkably courageous attempt to wrestle with the chaos of borderline experience. By embracing her own individuality, however cruel was her experience of it, Frida endure extraordinarily challenging encounters with the gods. Dr. West will suggest that she emerged for these encounters with a strengthened ego, along with access to more developed defenses.

In the ninth volume of his Collected Works, Archtypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung selected Khidr from the 18th sutra of the Koran as an Image of the Guide in the psychological process of rebirth and transformation. His Eranos colleague, Henri Corbin, philosopher and Iranologist, respected Khidr as a Threshold Figure, an Awakener into the Imaginal World. By way of amplification, Corbin brought to the Western world the work of the 13th century Islamic mystic, Ibn Arabi, who was first initiated by his experience with Khidr. In his wealth of writings, Ibn Arabi highlighted the existence of an organ of perception that perceives a very precise order of reality, the mundus imaginalis. In the Friday evening lecture, we will explore the writings of Ibn Arabi, the organ of perception and the realm of Khidr.

Jung’s concept of synchronicity represents one of the most strenuous efforts of the 20th century to construct a bridge across the chasm between mind and matter, self and world, psyche and cosmos. In popular culture, the concept has been surprisingly widely embraced. The term and the phenomena it describes played no small role in the way many individuals make sense of their lives. In the face of the disenchanted modern worldview, the search for a ground of purpose and meaning that transcends human subjectivity has become an urgent spiritual priority. For many today, synchronicities are directly relevant to the search. The concept has also had a unique impact on the intellectual world, from religious studies to physics. In tonight’s lecture, Dr. Tarnas will summarize the origin and history of the concept in Jung’s work, discuss the experiential dimension of synchronistic events, and address their larger metaphysical and perhaps evolutionary implications.