| Lecture: This presentation will cover: understanding depression and the quest for meaning, knowing suicide and its creative potential, and egocide and transformation (an innovative Jungian humanistic therapeutic paradigm). Egocide and transformation entails healing depressive and suicidal states through the creative technique of active imagination. In other words, the symbolic death of a destructive ego (and shadow) — ‘the false self’ — and the subsequent creative expressions lead to the birth of the ‘true self.’ Dr. Rosen will also talk about crisis points (such as adolescence, mid-life, divorce and loss of a loved one) and how egocide can help.
Workshop: This format will allow for the in-depth presentation and discussion of an actual case (a depressed and suicidal patient). Participants will learn how the egocide and transformation model is applied and how it works. The patient, guided by the analyst, symbolically kills (or analyzes to death) negative aspects of the ego and shadow (egocide and shadowcide) and the related depressive and suicidal state is transformed through the creative arts.
Suicide is literally a dead end. Whereas, egocide involves a symbolic death and rebirth experience. Egocide and transformation allows the suffering melancholic individual to live, heal the soul through creativity and find meaning in life.
David H. Rosen, M.D., is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and McMillan Professor of Analytical Psychology at Texas A & M University. Both the lecture and workshop will be based on his book Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul Through Creativity published in paperback by Penguin in 1996. He is also the author of The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity, likewise published in paperback by Penguin in 1997.
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Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul Through Creativity; Egocide, Symbolic Death & New Life