Season: Spring 2018

C.G. Jung’s theory of psychological type offers us tremendous insight, yet people who are identical in type may still approach the world with very different attitudes and assumptions. How we make sense of the world involves emotional investments and intellectual frameworks that tie to, but also go beyond, type.

Joseph Henderson, a co-author, with Jung, of Man and His Symbols, worked on this problem in his book, Cultural Attitudes in Psychological Perspective. Henderson observed that different people apply different cultural values as they engage with the world around them. He called these the social attitude, the religious attitude, the philosophical attitude, the aesthetic attitude, and, a relative latecomer, the psychological attitude.

Using illustrative clips from recent and classic films, John Beebe will lead us in exploring these orientations toward what is offered already by our culture. Participants will take away a new way of observing and understanding themselves and others.

We are living in a time of heightened border awareness as our old securities of containment and simple divisions of collective tribe and individual ego are forced open by new challenges. Walls don’t work well in the world of internet and drones, nuclear, biological, and informational contaminations, offshore banking, and moving populations of refugees.

In this fluid, open and expanding world, simple divisions don’t work well even in psychology. Beyond the tidy, binary separation into conscious and unconscious factors, we have become attuned to the rich plurality of complexes or ‘self-states’ operative in every interchange between people. We are also becoming accustomed to working with the reality of open and interpenetrating borders between our various complexes and their field effects on the neurology and coherence of others in our immediate and global environment.

So we are increasingly aware of the impossibility of neat borders and must attend to the multiple effects of subtle neurological pulsations, of mirror neurons, hemispheric attunements, bodily sensations, emotional flavors and field dynamics that are alive across the threshold between us as we sit in the multi-dimensional flow that is rich but also often fearful. Such open consciousness forces us to levels of complexity and integration that psychologists began to explore more than a century ago. Jung beautifully understood then the values of seeking images for orientation.

In our current globalizing crisis, which stirs anxiety, I have been gripped by an image that comes from an era where similarly vast, cultural shifts were underway and managed by figures representing the qualities needed to survive. For me the ancient, shamanic herdsman, Hermes, god of paths and open boundaries, has become a marker from which to expand towards such complexity. His early stories, more emotional and cosmic than the ones from Hellenic Greece or medieval alchemy, shape a presence that can orient consciousness in a world with wide open borders. They also connect to tales of boundary-making from Neolithic, Northern Europe, when the Goddess of the vast earth and sky was divided into tribal lands, and shamanic elders sang the moving clans back to themselves.

In the Friday evening talk, I will present Hermes as an early herdsman and shamanic deity, showing pictures and telling stories of his origins and qualities, which are important for our own time. He represents the threshold where energies and forms interweave, where consciousness rises from and opens back into the fluid matrix of psyche to bring perception of multifaceted order, creativity, and healing.

According to C. G. Jung, patients who come to us for healing often have…

….a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of.  To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story.  It is the patient’s secret, the rock against which he is shattered.  If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment…but how to gain that knowledge?  In most cases exploration of the conscious material is insufficient.  Sometimes [projective techniques] can open the way, so can the interpretation of dreams, or long and patient human contact with the individual (Jung, 1963:117).

Another avenue through which we can “open the way” to our untold stories is through film. Not only do contemporary films give a vivid portrait of the shattering caused by trauma, but they also point the way towards healing, and in this way, set the stage for enhanced personal and clinical understanding.  We might even say that films are themselves part of the solution to the problem of trauma in our time, aiding in the creation of moving and meaningful stories out of the shattering experiences that otherwise leave us fragmented and lost.

Friday Evening Film and Discussion:  As It Is In Heaven, a Swedish film by Kay Pollak, 2005.

Early developmental trauma always involves an injury to the capacity to feel.  And when this happens, the window to life closes. Overwhelmingly painful feelings that were part of the trauma are dissociated and become part of the untold story that must finally be opened and the original pain re-experienced.   As It Is In Heaven is a moving film about the traumatic closing—and then re-opening–of the protagonists (Daniel’s) capacity to feel.  Through his conscious suffering, a window to life re-opens.  We will see the film together and discuss its implications for the understanding and healing of trauma.