A compelling and inspiring portrait of Carl Gustav Jung, a man whose extraordinary genius and humanity reached far beyond the realm of psychiatry to the essential nature of who we are and what we hope to become. The film offers a fuller perspective on this analyst, healer, friend, and mentor, through skillful interweaving of home movies, archival footage and a wealth of interviews, including with notables Marie-Louise von Franz, Sir Laurens van der Post, and Joseph Henderson.

Jungian analysts Thayer Greene, Erica Lorentz and Penelope Tarasuk will discuss the film and take questions and comments from the audience.

Friday, October 5, 2018
Penny Tarasuk: Dreaming Animals: Numinous Creatures of Darkness and Light

“The animal is sublime and, in fact, represents the divine side of the human psyche.”

~ C.G. Jung

“If a man could prove to some bird or animal that he was a worthy friend, it would share with him precious secrets…the animal would share with man his power, skill and wisdom.”

~ Standing Bear, V. Deloria Jr., Jung and the Sioux Tradition

Nightmares, guidance, wisdom and deliverance; animal images and stories help us as we live in the times and season of darkness.

Penelope Tarasuk, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst (IAAP), author and artist, graduated 1988, C.G. Jung Institute of Boston, and practices in South Deerfield and Cambridge, MA.

Friday, November 2, 2018
John Peck: Brother to Dragons: Jung’s Midlife Initiation

Several paintings in Jung’s Red Book portray an encounter with an oriental dragon over a Swiss mountain village at night, and also the fruitful death of a different dragon. We’ll follow clues that embrace both, in the RB and elsewhere, and how they anticipated a second initiation in Jung, a fact which can help us poor blokes.

John Peck is an analyst (IAAP), a poet (ten books, Cantilena most recently), and co-translator of Jung’s Red Book and the forthcoming Black Book. He taught at Princeton, Mount Holyoke, Skidmore, and the U. of Zurich, and lives in Brunswick, Maine

Friday, December 7, 2018
Thayer Greene: The Many Faces of Hate and Alienation

This topic is in contrast to my lecture last December, “The Many Faces of Love”. Today we are experiencing a resurgence of individual and collective shadow dynamisms in our own country and across the globe. I shall be dealing with such issues as projection, sub-humanization, tribalism, collapse of shared values, and loss of individual power and authority.

Thayer Green, Ph.D.,Jungian Analyst (IAAP), trained in New York and Zurich, Switzerland. He practices in Amherst, MA and is a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Boston. He has written a book and many articles in the field.

Sunday, January 6, 2019 1:00-4:00 pm
Ed Tick: Archetypal Healing of Combat Veterans

Military Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Moral Injury are notoriously difficult to treat. Healing efforts must match the survivors’ inner worlds and embodied experiences. They must also provide corrective experiences and offer a life path consistent with military service. Dr. Tick will discuss the value of the archetypal approach for healing combat trauma.

Ed Tick, Ph.D., director of Soldier’s Heart, Inc. (www.soldiersheart.net) has been working to heal the invisible wounds of violent military trauma for over forty years. Author of six books including the groundbreaking War and the Soul, he has been subject matter expert on healing PTSD for the U.S. military and has been leading annual healing and reconciliation journeys to Viet Nam since 2000.

Friday, January 11, 2019 7:00-9:00 pm
Penny Tarasuk, Elric Walker, Christine Olson: “The Handless Maiden”:  A Fairy Tale in Words and Music

Live piano music provides an emotional analogue for this fascinating story. Penny and Elric will tell the tale and discuss it with the audience. Christine, at the piano, will offer pieces by Brahms to portray the inner life of the characters.

Christine Olson, Elric Walker and Penny Tarasuk serve on the board of the Jung Association of Western MA.

Friday, February 1, 2019
Anita Greene: Revisiting “Beauty and the Beast”, My Favorite Fairy Tale

I shall explore this fairy tale from the perspective of both feminine and masculine psychology. For a woman the tale symbolizes the release from the idealized bond with the father and the confrontation with the erotic animal side of her nature. For a man the tale reflects the split between the spiritual and instinctual sides of his nature. Each grows by their developing relationship in the castle.

Anita Greene, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst (IAAP) and Rubenfeld Synergist, is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of New York. She is a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston and has a private practice in Amherst.

Friday, March 1, 2019
Erica Lorentz: Jung, Spirituality, and the Body

In this lecture, we will discuss how Jung invites us to honor and understand archetypal forces that push up from the unconscious. These forces are often pathologized, though they have been experienced, observed, and discussed since the beginning of human history. We will explore how we can have a healthy conscious relationship with them. Film clips and case material will illustrate this process.

Erica Lorentz, M.Ed., LPC, Jungian Analyst (IAAP), has a private practice in Amherst. She is a training analyst and has served on the Training Board at the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston. She is the President of the Jung Association of Western MA. Since 1986 she has lectured and taught workshops in the US and Canada.

Friday, April 5, 2019
Russell Holmes: Hope: The Appetite

Inherent in the state of being alive, hope, the earliest virtue, is indispensable. When conscious life stumbles in this regard, the unconscious supplies an endless font of creative, imaginative sustenance as seen in every person’s fantasy and in the greatest works of art. Holmes will examine the origins of hope in the human development insights of Erik Erickson and Eric Neumann as well as in the functioning, creative unconscious as manifest in individuals and in the collective consciousness of our time.

Russell Holmes (IAAP), is a 1979 graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich, and has been a member of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts since that time. His home is in Jamaica Plain, MA.

Friday, May 3, 2019
Diane Croft: Cooked in the Vessel: A Personal Experience of Alchemy in the 21st Century

Jung abruptly stopped work on the Red Book to pursue alchemy, which he saw as a mirror image of the individuation process. “The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world,” he wrote in Psychology and Alchemy. What was it that he saw? What the alchemists called the Philosopher’s Stone, Jung thought of as the Self. In this presentation, Diane Croft will show how she got “cooked” in the alchemical vessel in the same way the alchemists described the transformative operation centuries ago. She will bring life and currency to a psychological process that is not about changing a person into someone else; it’s about bringing something out in a person that has been there all along.

Diane Croft, Ed.M., is a graduate of Wittenberg and Harvard University. She spent most of her career as a publisher at National Braille Press in Boston, MA. For three years, Diane had access to a hidden, animated realm, described by C.G. Jung as “the collective unconscious,” which she describes in her book The Unseen Partner: Love & Longing in the Unconscious. A recent review in Quadrant described it as comparable to Jung’s Red Book but easier to understand.