The arc from child to youth to university student can be particularly revealing about intellectual influences and role models, but very little has been written attempting to connect these influences with Jung’s later system. In this seminar, we will explore how Jung’s family life and academic career may have shaped the contours of his mature ideas.
 
We will examine how Jung’s forebears and family contributed to his later focus on religion and parapsychology. Using a variety of sources, we will explore what school contemporaries later recollected about Jung after he became famous. And finally we will discuss some of Jung’s Zofingia lectures, given to fellow university students in Basel, where philosophical and scientific influences emerge that became touchstones in his mature system.

Steven Minuk, PhD, is a former lecturer in English at the University of Toronto and is now a Jungian analyst in Toronto. He is currently working on a monograph titled Jung and the Idealist Tradition which examines the role of philosophical idealism in Jung’s system..

SUSTAINING MEMBERS: free - please contact the office

MEMBERS/students: $15 IN ADVANCE.

NON MEMBERS: $20 IN ADVANCE

We will look at Jung's original exploration of the mandala as taken from Eastern religion, and his psychological application of this notion to his concept of Self. Related concepts such as boundary and container, gestation and incubation, will attempt to point out how we can sometimes apply the practice of mandala-writing to our own individuation process.

No one would argue with the fact that the war in Ukraine, the Covid pandemic and increasing disasters due to climate change pose an existential threat to our species. All three are dire and require intense activism to limit the destruction. Yet only one mobilizes everyone, everywhere.  Why? The presentation will explore each of the ‘Horsemen’ , look at the underlying archetypal foundation of each and propose that the role of collective memory is key and that when it is missing it is harder to mobilize for a cause , no matter how dire.

Jan Bauer, MA, was born and raised in the USA, lived in various European countries for 20 years, and has sort of resolved her tension of opposites by settling in Quebec Canada for the last 40 years. She has been involved in training with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts as Director of Admissions and then of Training. And in Quebec, she gives seminars and presentations for professionals and the public in French and English, as well as maintaining an active bi-lingual private practice. Particular areas of interest are individuation, the shadow, the ‘democracy of the psyche’.

To complement our 2022 public forum on “Motherhood,” we return to the psychological wellspring of the foundational archetypes to address the other primary element of parenthood, Fatherhood. 

In “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual,” Jung writes,
The child possesses an inherited system that anticipates the existence of parents and their influence upon him.  In other words behind the father stands the archetype of the father and in the pre-existent archetype lies the secret of the father's power, just as the power which forces the bird to migrate is not produced by the bird itself but derives from its ancestors. CW 4: par. 739

The experience of Fatherhood constellates the archetype of the father and with it all the powers, patterns and pitfalls that enrich and challenge our roles as fathers.

In this panel, four OAJA Jungian analyst-fathers— Dan Hansen, Tim Pilgrim, Mitchell Smolkin, and Chris Wilkes —will explore their experiences in their roles as both analysts and fathers.

The growing rift between Prince Harry and Prince William illustrates the stark chasm between feeling and thinking typologies at a personal and national level.

While the British press has excoriated Harry and Meghan as narcissistic and disloyal, the American media has been more accepting of their embrace of psychotherapy and self expression as a legitimate form of liberation from the strictures of British culture and the Royal family.

Prince William photo: Robert Payne, Wikipedia                                                         Prince Harry photo: Eva Rinaldi, Wikipedia

We will discuss how Jung's theories of typology are so relevant to the misunderstandings in perception that are the hallmark of these kinds of conflicts. We will also discuss how Jung's idea of individuation as a 'work against nature' is relevant to this conflict where a synthesis is needed to incorporate shadow and inferiority.

In our continuing series on the fundamentals of analytical psychology, analysts will review Jung’s revolutionary views of psychic functioning in the following areas of interest:

1. Persona: Theory and Practice  Sun. Feb. 12 1-3:30pm  David Pressault
2. Active Imagination: Theory and techniques Sun. Mar. 12 10am-12:30pm   Steven Minuk
3. Shadow: The first step in the Individuation Path   Sun. Apr. 16 1-3:30pm  Mary Tomlinson
4. Anima, Animus*   Sun. May. 28 10am-12:30pm  Robert Black

*The May seminar will be held in the Board Room, Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm St. February, March and April seminars will be online via Zoom.

Sun. Feb. 12 1-3:30pm Zoom
Sun. Mar. 12 10am-12:30pm Zoom
Sun. Apr. 16 1-3:30pm Zoom
Sun. May 28 10am-12:30pm A&L Club

Niki de St. Phalle with artist and lover Jean Tinguely and a team of local residents created a monumental sculpture garden beginning in the late 1970s in Tuscany, Italy. It was officially open to the public two decades later in 1998. Niki considered the Tarot Garden her life’s work.

This course will explore how through the creation of the Tarot Garden and its 22 representations of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck, Niki transformed her negative parental complexes, confronted her shadow material and channelled the autonomous creative spirit or duende to which she gave her life.

Atalanta was abandoned in the woods by her father, who wanted a son. A she-bear nursed her until hunters found her and raised her. Devoting herself to the goddess Artemis, Atalanta vowed chastity, and distinguished herself as an exceptional hunter and runner. She is even reputed to have fought alongside the Argonauts and drawn first blood in a battle with the monstrous Calydonian Boar.

Atalanta's fame grew until her father, a king, recognized and acknowledged her. He demanded that she marry, but according to Ovid, Atalanta had consulted an oracle who prophesied that marriage would be her undoing. So she told her father that she would only marry the one who could beat her in a foot race. Any who failed would be put to death. Many tried and lost their lives, until one man, Hippomenes, prayed to Aphrodite for help. He received an intriguing gift which enabled him to win both the race and Atalanta's love

Many modern people find themselves caught between the affirming fulfilment of their career successes and an inner or outer pressure to make space for vulnerability and love in their personal lives. In this seminar, we will delve into the story of Atalanta and consider how the myth of this ancient heroine depicts an archetypal tension between personal achievement and relationships that we continue to experience today.

“We are so convinced that death is simply the end of a process that it does not ordinarily occur to us to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfillment, as we do without hesitation the aims and purposes of youthful life in its ascendance.”                         CW 8, p. 797

In this seminar we will consider Jung’s writings on the soul and death in light of one’s own lived psychology. Participants are encouraged to ask themselves the following two questions:

1) Is it possible to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfillment?

2) Is it necessary to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfillment?

The Voice of Jung is a 75-minute one-man show by actor Raymond O’Neill. In it, the sometimes controversial but always fascinating ideas of Carl Jung are interwoven with O’Neill’s own dreams of Jung and stories of his ten-day sojourn to Jung’s hallowed and private retreat, the Bollingen Tower on the shores of the Lake of Zurich, Switzerland.

With material gathered from Jung’s Red Book and his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, plus selected passages of the correspondence between O’Neill and Jung’s eldest living grandchild Brigitte Merk-Niehaus, the timely, alarmingly thought-provoking and sometimes delightfully humorous “The Voice of Jung” is sure to please not only those familiar with Jung’s work. It will also serve as a comprehensive introduction to the life and ideas of Analytical Psychology’s founding father C.G. Jung, one of the 20th century’s most seminal thinkers.

Learn more about this event.