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Saturday, July 24 |  10:00am - 12:30pm, Eastern Time

DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY: An Individuation Journey Through Realms of Shadow to the Mystery of Transformation, a fundraising lecture with Murray Stein

*Zoom links will be shared at 3pm ET on Friday, July 23

The Jung Society of Washington presents our annual celebration of the birthday of Carl Jung (July 24) with a free lecture by the internationally known and highly regarded Jungian author and analyst Murray Stein, Ph.D. (Google him); it’s both a free program and a fundraiser — a gift to all who need or want one and an expression of thanks to our Jung Society of Washington community.  We’re offering it free to people who want to dip their toes into Jung, but can’t commit, or to people who just need a free program for whatever reason.  This is a year when we all just need a little support sometimes, and we want you to know that we are delighted and grateful to have you with us!

This year, 2021, marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death in Ravenna, Italy. Only several months before his death at the age of 56 he completed his poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, for which he has become famous through the ages. He is universally celebrated as one of history’s great geniuses of imaginative literature. But his poem is far more than a literary tour de force. It is the impressive account of psychological and spiritual development in the second half of life using a method that today we call active imagination.

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Saturday, July 31 and Sunday, August 1 |  10:30am - 2:30pm, Eastern Time

CELTIC CALENDAR, CELTIC MYTH, a Day With Series with Kathryn Cook-Deegan and Elaine King

Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors  

What they undertook to do

 They brought to pass;  

All things hang like a drop of dew

 Upon a blade of grass.      

                                               — W.B. Yeats  

Please email natalia@jung.org to enroll.

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Friday, August 13, 2021 |  7:30-9:00pm, Eastern Time

“I [Jung]: Allow me the indiscrete question: have you ever had an incubation sleep in your kitchen?

   L [Librarian]: No, I’ve never entertained such a strange idea.

   I [Jung]: Let me say that you’d learn a lot that way about the nature of your kitchen.

    Good night, Sir!”                                                                           

                  - C.G. Jung, The Red Book

Tonight’s program is about using dream incubation and lucid dreaming practices to mine the wisdom of the psyche and body so we can take direct responsibility for our health and individuation. Through these techniques we can develop our intentional awareness by asking our dreams for guidance, not just for revelation for healing our traumas and diseases, but also to prevent them.

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Friday, August 20, 2021 |  7:30-9:00pm, Eastern Time

“I called my soul and asked her to dive down into the floods, whose distant roaring I could hear… And thus she plunged into the darkness like a shot, and from the depths she called out: “Will you accept what I bring?” C.G. Jung, The Red Book 

“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/ It is not dying…/ Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void/ It is shining…/ That you may see the meaning of within/ It is being…/ That love is all and love is everyone/ It is knowing….” Tomorrow Never Knows, John Lennon and Paul McCartney

How we can authentically participate, embody, and co-create with the inexhaustible depths of the psyche and reap benefits from this divine resource is the focus of tonight’s program. We are all possessed of many personality parts and the more dissociated we are from these parts, the more we are unwittingly possessed by them. Building a bridge of relationship to these many selves yields more than a duality of good and evil like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The dive down might more resemble Alice going down the rabbit hole and encountering an entire world of characters. There we may meet a talking rabbit or receive an invitation from an unseen, traumatized inner child, which may come to us from the compelling experience of a panic attack.

Friday, August 27 |  7:30 - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

von FRANZ AND THE EVIL STEPMOTHER, a lecture with Steve Buser

A poisoned apple.  An evil stepmother.  A cold dark tower.  The heroine is confronted out of the darkness of her own unconscious.  Will she be devoured by the dark animus of the archetypal evil stepmother, or can she confront her ghosts and transform them into a healing space of strength?

Join us, as Steven Buser, general editor of The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz, gives us a behind the scenes look into the editing process and dives with us into content of Volume Three, Archetypal Symbols in Fairytales: The Maiden’s Quest.

Dr. von Franz is the master at bringing fairytales alive and fathoming their depths.  Her writings are some of the most profound work ever done on fairytales.  Her deepening journey in Volume Three marvelously illuminates the quest of the feminine.

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Friday, September 3, 2021 |  7:30-9:00pm, Eastern Time

“To recognize and know your ambitions and your greed, to gather your craving, to cultivate it, grasp it, make it serviceable, influence it, master it, order it, to give it interpretations and meanings, is extravagant.” C.G. Jung, The Red Book.

In this evening’s talk we will examine how creating a special collection of our most impactful dreams and nightmares, rapturous visions and imaginings, from both the night and day, can open us to our highest potentials. Recording and getting to know these experiences intimately, can help us embody our evolving personal myth and live more vitally in the present. But, paradoxically, becoming too attached to these experiences is “extravagant.” Ultimately, we need to be able to dissolve our attachment to these patterns and the identities that have created obstacles to our health, individuation, and liberation. In order to accomplish this dissolution, as Jung wrote in the Red Book, “I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am.”

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Friday, September 11, 2021 - Sunday, May 15, 2022 |  10:00am-5:00pm, Eastern Time

Friday, September 17, 2021 |  7:30-9:00pm, Eastern Time

When relational trauma strikes the developing psyche of a child, a split sometimes occurs in which a wounded and “innocent” part of the self retreats into the unconscious where it continues to live in suspended animation as a lost soul--often represented symbolically in archetypal material as a lost or orphaned ‘child.’ Deprived of this lost core of aliveness, the outer personality struggles to survive in a “de-animated” world, often becomes depressed, and sometimes seeks psychotherapeutic help. Depth Psychotherapy offers the opportunity for renewed contact with the lost soul and hence for renewed feeling-life, creativity, and relatedness—but not without fierce resistance thrown up by the psyche’s defensive powers.

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Saturday, September 18, 2021 |  1:00-4:00pm, Eastern Time

Severe early trauma often constitutes an injury to the capacity to feel. This difficulty in the ability to consciously experience, relate to, and regulate feelings, often lasts a lifetime and leads to serious difficulties in human relationships and the secure attachments to others that makes intimacy possible. In this seminar we will explore ways to restore this feeling-capacity through body-centered attention in the psychotherapy dyad to feelings- in-the-moment and to the defenses that prevent such feelings from becoming conscious. Using imaginative techniques as well as Jungian-informed dream work, Dr. Kalsched will demonstrate how the depth-psychotherapy relationship can serve as a major vehicle for the healing of trauma.

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Five Alternate Mondays, September 20 - November 15 |  7:30 - 9:30pm, Eastern Time

NOVELS OF CREATIVITY, a Course With Julie Bondanza

This series of novels explores the creative process: where ideas come from, what we are willing to do to have our creative work noticed, how the pressure from societal or familial sources affect the development and production of the product, how our personal biographies and complexes are reproduced in the work, and the creative process itself.

The novels, in order of discussion are: The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland,  Self Portrait with Boy by Rachel Lyon, My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, the Song of the Lark by Willa Cather and The Master by Colm Toibin.

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Saturday, October 16 |  1:00 - 4:00pm, Eastern Time

We Are Meant to Create

The Creative Self as an aspect of the unconscious gifts us with wisdom. We can become enlivened by our ability to see beyond the limits of the ego, as we move with joyful expression into creating. The possibility for enriching life is magnified through the reflective exchange of dreamwork and writing.

Our time together in the DreamWriting Workshop will allow us to engage with both of these creative processes, increasing self-knowledge by first re-visiting dreams that seem to want deepening. They might be re-occurring dreams or nightmares. They are the dreams that still call to you, perhaps even since childhood. Dream language and images will guide us in the creative writing of poetry, short stories and memoir that give voice to perhaps the most significant dream of the life.

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Four Wednesdays, November 3 - 24  |  7:00 - 8:30pm, Eastern Time

How do we understand ourselves? What stands in the way of greater self-awareness? What life force seeks expression through us? These four programs will explore 1) our internal resistance to self-knowledge, 2) the paradox that our defenses become our chief obstacles, 3) the necessary engagement with our “stories” that bind us to our past, and 4) unfolding the personal myth.

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Friday, November 5  |  7:30 - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

This presentation by two Jungian analysts will focus on the cultural implications and potential for creativity and growth within feminine rage. Through personal reflections and varied theoretical frameworks, this controversial topic will be brought from its dark, feared and hidden depths into the light of consciousness. The use of story-telling, film and poetry will assist in amplifying and animating the meaning and necessity of feminine rage and aggression, particularly in today’s world. As Jung himself informs us, what remains unconscious is often lived out in our fate. Our stance in presenting this material is to facilitate communication and discussion rather than align with positions that support oppression, fear, violence or shame in all of us.