CULTURAL ATTITUDES, John Beebe

Friday

Jung Memorial Lecture

John Beebe 

C.G. Jung’s theory of psychological types offers us tremendous insight into ourselves and others, 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 seems to involve emotional investments and intellectual frameworks that tie to, but also go beyond, type.

Joseph Henderson, one of the founders of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and 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 reference different values generic to culture 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 that informed much of Jung’s work, 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.

John Beebe, a senior analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, is a psychiatrist who specializes in psychotherapy. He is the author of Integrity in Depth, co-author of The Presence of the Feminine in Film, and co-editor of The Question of Psychological Types. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he has written about psychological types for numerous books and journals including Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis, Jungian Analysis, Jungian Psychoanalysis, The Journal of Analytical Psychology, Jung Journal, Psychological Perspectives, and Theory & Psychology. Beebe’s eight-function, eight-archetype model of type is widely studied and applied in the field. In addition, he has spearheaded a Jungian typological approach to the analysis of film.