This powerful, provocative, and insightful film explores the transformational life of one of the West’s most important wisdom keepers. It sends a clarion call to a planet in the midst of “a shedding of its outworn skin.” Renowned Jungian analyst and author Marion Woodman is celebrated for her work on feminine psychology and addiction, but her words and her wisdom speak to nearly everyone. 

David Stephenson Bond: Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life

 

This lecture explores the dilemma of how to live life creatively at a time when the dominant myths of our culture are losing their power to give meaning to our lives. Using C. G. Jung’s idea of discovering a “personal myth” we will reflect on the psychology of mythic imagination as a force in both culture and individual life. This lecture offers insights into the possibilities of cultural renewal and individual meaning through the restoration of the imagination.

 

 

Penny Tarasuk: Accepting Psyche’s Gift – The Dream

 

Dreams help guide during the first half of life in slaying of the dragon of unconsciousness, leaving “home,” establishing the outer world of love, work, play, and glimpses of the numinous. The second half requires that we must attend the marriage within and accept the necessity of surrendering the heroic attitude of the ego complex and reliance on the material world. If attended, dreams help in the development of a symbolic life, deepen our sense of meaning, and can assist in bringing life to conclusion.

 

 

Thayer Greene: Psychic Transformation in the Analytic Process

 

Jung advanced his experiential thesis that there are within each individual potentials for transformation toward the wholeness of the individual personality. Such transformations occur within many life contexts including the analytic relationship. Using many examples, Thayer will explore the stages in embodied psychic transformation (i.e. individuation) mediated by the Jungian vision and method.

 

Erica Lorentz: Introduction to Alchemical Symbols of Transformation

 

We will explore some processes and symbols in alchemy, the ancient discipline that sought to transform our inner mundane prima materia into a substance of great psychological and spiritual value. At the end of the Red Book, Jung discovered that the rich symbolic system of the alchemists described his own experiential method of active imagination and his theory of individuation. Alchemical prints and film clips will illustrate the relevance of these symbols today.

 

Anita Greene: The Embodied Unconscious

 

Using an embodied approach to the unconscious one can be more fully present not only to the images that bubble up but to the emotional impact and challenge to our ego’s sense of identity. Jungians are often accused of getting lost in the world of symbolic images. Jung, speaking to himself as well as to his disciples, warned, “Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now.” Using clinical examples Anita shall show how we can incorporate the image through sensory imagination.

 

 

Russell Holmes: Michelangelo – The Three Pietas

 

When he was 23 years old, Michelangelo was commissioned to sculpt the religious image of Mary holding the body of her dead son for the tomb of a French cardinal. This Roman pieta is the sculpture with which we are all familiar. In his late middle age, he took up the image again in a pieta which he planned for his own tomb – the Florentine pieta. He was working on his final Milan pieta until several days before he died. This lecture will discuss the pietas in their historical, religious and symbolic contexts in the progressive expansion of an image from the genius of Michelangelo Buonaroti.

 

 

John Ryan Haule: Jung in the 21st Century

NOTE: For this lecture we will meet in Hillyer Graham Hall in the Fine Arts Building, Smith College