Saturday, June 3  | 1:00pm - 4:00pm, Eastern Time

Esu and Sisyphus: At the Crossroads of Intergenerational Complexes and Collective Racial Trauma: a workshop with Fanny Brewster

Mythology underpins our archetypal sensibilities for our human lives. During our time together, we will explore how the African mythologies of Esu and those of the Greek Sisyphus merge in telling our contemporary 21^st-century story of racial trauma and potential healing related to cultural racial complexes. 

The deepening of consciousness that has required us to consider the intergenerational nature of racial trauma can also require us to find the depths of our collective cultural stories in seeking solutions to racism, race, and raciality. In our discussions, we can hope to explore how, when, and to whom racialized enactments occur. We can seek within our conversations to find those places within ourselves owning personal individuation, engaged community, and collective participation. These can serve as sources of potential salvation, through finding the remedy for healing our American cultural poison of racial suffering.

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Four Tuesdays, June 6 - 27  | 7:30pm - 9:30pm, Eastern Time

Sacred Threads: An Archetypal Approach to Discerning and Deepening Your Spiritual Journey, a course with Jennifer Selig

I primarily define spirituality as that feeling of being connected to something beyond our small selves and beyond the mundane plane in which we typically live our lives. That thing could be God or the Goddess, Nature, a Higher Power, or other glorious Beings on this earth and beyond. I also appreciate Brené Brown’s definition of spirituality:

Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.

If Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is right when he observed that “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience” but rather “we are spiritual beings having a human experience,” then it would benefit us to spend some time contemplating our spiritual journey, which is to contemplate our spiritual being. I believe that such contemplation, where we look at our personal journeys through an archetypal lens, can help us understand where we have been and inspire us going forward toward more of Brown’s perspective, meaning, and purpose. Certainly, this sort of contemplation is what Jung did in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which will be our core text for this program.

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Saturday, June 23  | 7:30pm - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

The C.G. Jung Memorial Lecture: Opening the Closed Heart: Meetings with the Human and Archetypal Child in the Psychotherapy of Early Trauma with Donald E. Kalsched

The process of realizing oneself as a person (“individuation”) was for C. G. Jung equivalent to the unfolding of latent potentials in the personality--a vital spark of aliveness--something sacred and utterly unique in each of us. The potential for this “unfolding,” Jung felt, lay deep in the foundations of the personality, like a seed, and was universally represented in mythology as the archetype of the innocent orphaned child in exile. 

Trauma in childhood accounts for such exile.  By studying the lives of people who have survived early trauma, we discover that the ideal “unfolding” of the personality Jung envisioned is partially blocked and distorted by powerful-but-necessary archetypal defenses. These defenses divide up the inner world and banish unbearably painful feelings to the unconscious where they continue to live in “suspended animation” as implicit memories or as the orphaned specters of a traumatic childhood.  When psychotherapy begins, these wounded, ghost-like remnants of our childhood selves re-emerge, seeking acceptance and healing.  If accepted, they also bring with them a numinous, ineffable dimension that often accompanies the experience of healing.

However, the recovery of these lost parts of the self is often strongly resisted by the psyche’s defensive powers and their organization in a “system” (Self-Care System) of both protection and persecution. Successful psychotherapy depends on our understanding of these dynamics.

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Saturday, June 24  | 1:00pm - 4:00pm, Eastern Time

The Carl Jung Memorial Workshop: Working with the Self Care System with Donald E. Kalsched

The battle that emerges in trauma therapy between feeling- and anti-feeling powers as they find their way into the analytic partnership is one that Jung seldom described and is much stormier than the benign “unfolding” of human potential he sometimes described as “individuation.”   To understand the human and archetypal “children” in the psyche (and their split-off vulnerable feelings), we must also understand the human and archetypal oppressors of these “children” (and their violent, attacking energies). This will require a re-visioning of Analytical Psychology in light of contemporary findings about affect and defense in the earliest years of child development, when intractable dissociative defenses and their organizing “systems” are formed. 

In this workshop we will explore various clinical examples of the “stormy negotiation” between the analytic partners for the release of the psyche’s “children.”