DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

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Visiting Scholars Lecture Series

Topics in Jungian & Archetypal Psychology, Art & Spirituality

Spring 2008

Vicki Noble, M.A.      Matriarchal Egalitarian Cultures

This seminar held on International Women’s Day focuses on the characteristics of matriarchal cultures. The words matriarchy and patriarchy have become highly charged and almost taboo in our culture, due in part to the historical shift in fundamental social organizational structure from matriarchy to patriarchy.  Matriarchy as it existed in ancient, traditional, and tribal cultures around the world manifested as cultures with mothers at the center, who give birth to both male and female children and love them both.  Matriarchal cultures are first and foremost egalitarian. Today women and men from living matriarchal cultures have come forward to name and describe themselves at two recent International Congresses on Matriarchal Studies, the first one in Luxembourg in 2003, and more recently in Austin, Texas, in 2005. 

In this seminar we discuss matriarchy and the possible ways we might consider using the matriarchal model to bring about a much-needed shift in our own culture, which has gone so far to violence and militarism that it has stripped our schools and other social programs of the necessary support to sustain life.

Vicki Noble, M.A., is a healer, teacher, artist, independent scholar, and author of works that revision history to include women.  She is co-creator of the Motherpeace round tarot; author of Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess; Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World; and most recently The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power.  She travels and teaches internationally, and is on the faculty of the Women's Spirituality Masters program (formerly at New College). She is an early activist in the women's liberation and women's health movements of the 1970s, and is an active mother and grandmother.  She maintains a private consulting and healing practice in Santa Cruz. 

Fariba Bogzaran, Ph.D.      A Creative Journey into Dreams

This seminar focuses on how to access our creative potential through the practice of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming—awareness in dreams while we are dreaming—is a powerful practice of awakening to the great dimensions of our creative mind. Cultivating dream awareness is a practice of waking up to the unlimited depths of our creative self by learning and transforming our habits of the mind into something new.  Engaging in lucid dreaming challenges our perception and habitual patterns and can lead to the practice of lucid waking. This willingness to open our eyes to see our greatest potential, to own ourselves as creative beings, seems to be one of the deepest challenges humans face.

In this seminar we learn various methods of working with the dream creatively.  Participants have the opportunity to engage in lucidity practices and work with a dream through dream re-entry—a mode employing rhythmic drumming followed by automatic writing. Bring a dream to work with and a journal for writing.

Fariba Bogzaran, Ph.D., scholar and artist, is an Associate Professor and the founder of the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University.  She specializes in transpersonal experiences in lucid dreaming, and dreams and art.  She worked for the Lucidity Project exploring the science of lucid dreaming at Stanford Sleep Laboratory (1986-1990) and is a past Board member for the International Association for Study of Dreams (IASD) and the Lucidity Association.  Recent publications include Lucid Art and Hyperspace Lucidity (2003); Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them (2002); Experiencing the Divine in Lucid Dream State (1990); and Images of the Lucid Mind (1996).

Fall 2007

Brian Wittine, Ph.D.      The Dark Night of the Soul: Psychological  and Spiritual Perspectives

The term “dark night of the soul” was used by Christian contemplative St. John of the Cross to describe periods of intense suffering in which mystics feel that God has abandoned them and that their inner life of prayer has collapsed. In contemporary depth psychology, the term is sometimes used to describe periods that are central to the journey of individuation.  During these periods old ego-identifications break down and old values no longer hold true. Losses of loved ones, illnesses, and career setbacks are ways such periods might begin.  Very often, however, dark nights have no apparent cause.  In the midst of great achievement and success we begin to feel dissatisfied, empty, meaningless, purposeless, lost, alone in a wilderness.  There is no life, no growth.  Something essential is missing. We gradually come to realize that there is nothing we can do to improve our lot. We cannot get ourselves moving.  We have to wait … and wait …  Through this process we become increasingly aware of our source and dependence on the Self, our deep center of being and awareness.

During this seminar we  review parallels between experiences of the mystics and contemporary individuals. If we honor these periods as times for opening to our deepest longings, we might come to appreciate life’s greater meanings and find a more fulfilling relationship with Mystery.

Bryan Wittine, PhD, MFT, is an analyst-member of the C. G, Jung Institute of San Francisco in private practice in Marin County and San Francisco.  He is co-founder and former academic chair of the graduate program in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology at John F. Kennedy University.  He is currently writing on depth psychotherapy as a path of inner realization.

Maurenn Murdock, M.A.      Making Meaning of Myth & Memoir

Memoirists are our contemporary mythmakers. The popularity of memoir in our culture today reflects the universal desire to find meaning in the mystery of our lives and to understand our unconscious choices, actions, and dreams.  Myth owes its longevity to its power to express typical human emotions that have been experienced throughout successive generations. Memoir owes its popularity to its ability to portray these same enduring feelings in a contemporary individual's life. Both myth and memoir arise from the human need for connection. Myths use symbols and gods and goddesses to explore such themes as heroism, betrayal, the search for the mother/father and the beloved. Memoirs explore the very same themes in the stories of our every day lives. We will use the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a lens to explore the mythic themes in our own lives. Please come prepared to write.

This seminar includes discussion of mythic themes and of the elements of memoir writing, and includes writing exercises to begin the process of writing memoir. 

Maureen Murdock, M.A., M.F.T., is a depth psychotherapist and past Chair of the MA Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. She teaches in the Depth Psychology Program at Sonoma State University and has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program for the past 17 years, where she received the Outstanding Teacher Award in 1995. She has written a memoir about her mother's struggle with Alzheimer's—Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory—which is also a reflection on the nature of memoir writing. She is the author of three internationally published books: The Heroine's Journey; Fathers' Daughter: Breaking the Ties that Bind; and Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children. Murdock is the editor of Monday Morning Memoirs: Women in the Second Half of Life.

Spring 2007

David Tresan, M.D.      Amor and Psyche Revisited

Amor and Psyche is a myth that appears in the earliest extant novel in the western world (145A.D.). In his book Metamorphoses, subtitled the Golden Ass by Augustine 200 hundred or so years later, Apuleius, the author, relates the tale of Amor and Psyche as an entertainment, a pacifier, as it were, told by a babysitting Crone to distract and quiet a crying girl whose caravan has been hijacked by a band of bandits and ensconced in a hidden cave. How is he, Apuleius, privy to this scene? He, himself, is the protagonist of his own book, a picaresque novel in which he visits the various religious activities found in the Mediterranean basin in the 2nd c. AD. In this particular episode, ensorcelated and transformed into an ass by a witch, Apuleius witnesses the happenings in the cave as a silent beast. 

So much for the setting and framework of the tale. Told seemingly as a sop for the imagination, certainly not given the fanfare and gravity of a serious Platonic myth meant to convey universal truths, this charming story was taken most seriously nonetheless by Eric Neumann as a disquisition on the development of the feminine. His telling of the tale and his commentary stand as a classical example of Jungian archetypal research.

The hope in this seminar is to examine the tale ourselves, to test Neumann’s thesis, but more importantly to see what more may be found not so much concerning the development of the feminine but concerning the development of psyche itself, for, as will be seen, the story marks the turn, once and for all, from the mind and life of antiquity to that of modernity. At the same time, the nature and function of myth itself will be a matter of interest.  

We in the seminar who have read the myth will start with a retelling of it from memory in a round robin fashion, thereby creating our own myth of Apuleius’ version of the myth. This will require, of course, that a number of people in the seminar will have read the myth.  In our telling, in our possible misreadings, in our misprision (as Harold Bloom says), perhaps will be found our own originality, our own genius, at least our own entertainment.

David I. Tresan, M.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Mill Valley and San Francisco.  His abiding interest lies in the history of ideas and science, the evolution of consciousness, the psychology of the transcendent, and, most importantly, clinical work.  He has recently written on religion, neuroscience, and aging in various reviews and papers.  This New Science of Ours; A More or Less Systematic History of Consciousness and Transcendence appeared in two parts in the Journal of Analytic Psychology (2004).

James Preston, Ph.D.        Death and the Transformation of Consciousness

At the core of religious experience is the confrontation with mortality.  Every religious tradition addresses the wound of death by weaving a tapestry of hope to counter a profound sense of loss.  Every culture orchestrates the process of grief differently, providing rituals and ceremonies intended to heal the torn fabric, the chaos that death unleashes in our ordered worlds. 

This seminar is intended to elicit the symbolic dimension of the death experience and to explore the many ways in which the encounter with death can bring about a profound transformation of consciousness.  A variety of mystical traditions have employed the death metaphor to provide a way into higher levels of consciousness.  The seminar will draw on insights gleaned from a cross-cultural and comparative study of death symbolism and the rich literature on near death experiences.  Particular attention will be given to an understanding of the American way of death as it has evolved in the early part of the new millennium.

James Preston, Ph.D., has taught for over thirty years in the State University of New York as Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Religious Studies Program, and is the author of numerous books and articles in symbolic anthropology and religious studies.  He has conducted fieldwork on Hinduism in India and among Native American Catholic populations in the United States and Canada.  Dr. Preston is particularly interested in the interface between psychology and anthropology and the nature of religious experience. 

Jacqueline Thurston, M.A.        Sacred Images from Ancient Egypt

 “Thousand of years ago in ancient Egypt, feminine deities in concert with divine masculine figures governed the cosmic mysteries of life and death.”

In the spring of 2006, I spent four months living and working in Egypt as a Fulbright Scholar.  This seminar gathers together photographs, writing and insights into provocative figures from the cosmology of ancient Egypt.  The deities within this pantheon are startling complex in their symbolic form and metaphorical content.  In part, my presentation explores how the sacred feminine is inextricably intertwined with the sacred masculine.  Because I had access, granted by the Supreme Council of Antiquities, to tombs rarely opened to the public, some images have not been reproduced in classic texts.  Within the context of the presentation, there will be an opportunity for journal writing explorations.  Finally, in the spirit of the philosophy underlying the Fulbright exchange, I would also like to share stories of my encounters with university students and with individual Egyptians who befriended me and made my entry from modern Egypt into Egypt's past possible. 

Jacqueline Thurston, M.A., is an artist, writer and Professor of Art at San Jose State University where she taught for decades a graduate seminar, Image As Icon, that explored memories and dreams as potential sources for works of art.  Professor Thurston is twice the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and is a former Fulbright Scholar.  Her work is in major public collections including the Library of Congress, SMOMA, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale.  She has an interest in the interface between art and psychology and has given many presentations on the nature of the creative process from an artist’s perspective to psychoanalytic societies including the C.G. Jung Institute, the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, the American Institute of Medical Education and the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education.

Fall 2006

Richard Stein, M.D. Initiation as Surrender: A Twelve Year Analysis

Richard Stein, M.D is a Jungian analyst who has been practicing in SanFrancisco for the last 30 years. He is on the training faculty of the San Francisco Jung Institute, where he teaches regularly in the public programs and candidate seminars. This presentation will be based on the chapter he wrote for an upcoming publication of papers presented at a public program in San Francisco honoring the work on initiation by Dr. Joseph Henderson.

Robert J. Hoss, M.S. Dream Language

Bob Hoss, MS, is the author of Dream Language and Executive Officer and former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.  As a scientist with training in Gestalt therapy, he has been teaching dreamwork for over 30 years and is on the faculty of the Haden Institute for dream leadership training, and the adjunct faculty of Scottsdale College in Arizona.  He frequently appears on radio and TV.

Philip Novak, Ph.D. Jung's Psychology in the Light of John Hick's Philosophy of Religious Pluralism

In recent decades few thinkers have been more important to the field of global philosophy of religion than the Englishman, John Hick. The ideas first systematically presented in his seminal An Interpretation of Religion have now exerted a worldwide influence. This seminar places key aspects of Hick's philosophy of religious pluralism into dialogue with the ideas of C. G. Jung.

The seminar addresses six areas: Introduction: a note on global theology; naturalistic vs. religious interpretations of religion: Jung as a religious interpreter of religion; the Kantian turn (Hick and Jung on the limits of human knowing); the common psychological structure of the great religions; the question of method: the classical yogas and Jung's dream yoga; goodness and wholeness: ethical and psychological views of the ends of human development.

Spring 2006

Eric Thompson, M.A. Biblical Creation Stories & the Mythic Imagination

This seminar surveys Biblical creation myths with selective attention to a few of them. We will regard the Garden of Eden, with its interesting insights into the human condition, and Proverbs 8, which arguably contains the remnant of a Hebrew Goddess, Hokmah (Greek: Sophia), as a consort and co-creator with Yahweh. We will explore the potential in these texts to relate to depth psychology.

Eric Thompson, Ph.D. candidate, is Instructor of Religious Studies in the Humanities Department at Santa Rosa Junior college, where he teaches courses in Religious Studies. He has published and presented on the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and its various historical contexts; and comparative mythology and mythopoesis, its social function and religious institutionalization. He received the NISOD Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005.

Virginia Beane Rutter The Villa of Mysteries: Cultivating the Vine of Life

Our discussion last fall focused on the archetype of Dionysos in ancient Greece, the image of his mask , his energy of possession and healing and its implications for clinical work. Today's seminar will take up the question of how we draw from his indestructible life stream, to vitalize our individual, characterized lives instead of our egos being obliterated by Dionysian energy. The Romans gave the god his due in the form of a ceremony that contained the potentially overwhelming energy of the archetype. This ceremony is depicted in the intense, colorful frescoes from the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii and has been interpreted as the initiation of a midlife woman into the cult of Dionysos. We will investigate the meaning it holds for both men and women. Please bring an altar object, and/or a dream or poem that speaks to this material for you so that we can express our individual ways of honoring this god of paradox.

Virginia Beane Rutter, M.S. is a Jungian analyst practicing in Mill Valley, California. She received her analytic training in both Zurich and San Francisco and holds M.A. degrees in Art History and Counseling Psychology. Her study of ancient myths and rites of passage through art history and archaeology is mirrored in her clinical work. She is the author of Woman Changing Woman: Feminine Psychology Re-Conceived Through Myth and Experience; and two books on parenting girls, Celebrating Girls: Nurturing and Empowering Our Daughters, and Embracing Persephone: How To Be the Mother You Want for the Daughter You Cherish. She is currently writing about Artemisian initiation.

Fall 2005

Craig Chalquist, MS, PhD Psychology Steps Outside: Toward a Science of Sacred Geography

Although depth psychology has focused from its inception on what has been pushed to the margins of culture and consciousness—symptom, instinct, suffering, fantasy, dream—its scope of inquiry has not been broadened to include the nonhuman subjectivities all around us. Nor has it developed a methodology for listening deeply to what our ancestors took for granted: the presence or voice of place as it echoes into human psychological life.

What would a methodology that takes the ensouled world at its nonhuman word look like? How would it illuminate the deep connections between sufferings of people and sufferings of the surround? What might it tell us about the parallels between personal complexes and apartment complexes, congested freeways and garbled communications, polluted beaches and darkened moods? Why has every culture in history but ours insisted that everything is "full of gods" and the Earth an animated abode? These are some of the questions to be examined in this presentation on terrapsychology, the study of the soul of place.

Craig Chalquist, M.S., Ph.D., is an ecological depth psychologist who has developed a methodology for working with the interplay of earth, human history, and collective and personal experience. His fieldwork in the Mission counties of California took him up and down the historic El Camino Real to study what he calls the return of the ecohistorically repressed. He is the author of The Tears of Llorona, an examination of the shadow side of California's swift and brutal colonization; and the forthcoming Terrapsychology: A New (and Ancient) Paradigm for Engaging the World's Soul (SUNY Press, 2006).

Virginia Beane Rutter, MA The Mask of Dionysos: Possession & Healing

The ancient Greeks made a distinction between Zoe—infinite, enduring life—and bios— characterized or individual life. Twice-born Dionysos is the archetype of Zoe, indestructible life. Dismembered and reconstituted, surrounded by women, he is the giver of wine, a healer who also causes madness, an ecstatic lover, and "eater of raw flesh." Psychologically, what does it mean to honor this god of paradox?

When the archetype of Dionysos erupts in the psyche of a woman or man, the individual's fate is deeply impacted by the ensuing encounter. In this seminar, we will discuss the Dionysian mysteries in Greece to amplify clinical material. Slides will be shown to bring the archetype alive in images.

Virginia Beane Rutter, M.A., is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco who writes and teaches. Her books include Woman Changing Woman: Feminine Psychology Re-Conceived through Myth and Experience.

Karlyn Ward, PhD Anchored in the Heart: Redeeming the Dark Feminine

This seminar draws on literature from the Song of Songs, the Gnostic text The Gospel of Mary, as well as current works; on images ancient to present; and on music from ancient Greece to contemporary times, to explore the figure of the long-repressed but powerful archetype of the dark feminine, an archetype of transformation. The dark, hidden, positive feminine will be accessed through the figure of Mary Magdalene, long associated with the Black Madonna, and great goddess figures such as Isis and the feminine Wisdom, Sophia.

Some of the story of this archetypal presence has reached popular awareness through novels such as The DaVinci Code. What is the meaning of its popularity? How does it fit in with scholarly psychological, theological, and alternative studies? What do we know, and how is this challenging information relevant to women, men, and the collective culture?

Karlyn M. Ward, Ph.D., LCSW, BCD, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Mill Valley and an analyst member of The C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco, She has taught at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. A musician, she is trained in the Bonny Method of using music clinically to access the unconscious, and is a Fellow in the Association for Music and Imagery. Her book Sounding the Depths: Psyche and Music is in process. She has given numerous seminars on music and psyche and on redeeming the dark feminine in the U.S and in France.

Spring 2005

Geri Olson, Ph.D. The Doll: Protection, Healing, Power & Play

Dolls have been a part of human existence for 25,000 years. From fertility rituals to child's play, they have a central role in understanding the needs and values of a culture. This seminar includes a slide presentation on the psychological role of dolls in several cultures, and a chance to explore how the doll process can be integrated into self-exploration processes. Seminar participants will have the opportunity to make a small doll using a variety of techniques, and to explore its symbolic meanings. Please note that this seminar offers an optional additional hour from 2-3 pm for individual and group exploration of the meaning of the doll.

Geri Olson, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Sonoma State University where she teaches in the area of creativity and expressive arts. She has integrated the doll process into her work for 25 years and is currently working on a doll project that has reached 400 K-12 students.

Alan Siegel, Ph.D. Dreams and Life Passages

At life’s turning points, our dreams and our nightmares offer an inner source of wisdom that can provide guidance, help us recover from trauma, and lead us to new and creative solutions. This seminar explores the patterns and recurring dreams which occur during life transitions such as marriage, pregnancy, separation and divorce, midlife, illness and injury, trauma and grief. Topics include posttraumatic nightmares, universal dreams and how they manifest during key life passages, the use of dreams for creative and spiritual inspiration, and techniques for exploring the meaning of dreams.

Alan Siegel, Ph.D., is the author of Dream Wisdom: Uncovering Life’s Answers in your Dreams. He is a Past-President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams; Assistant Clinical Professor, UC Berkeley, Department of Clinical Science; and Adjunct Faculty at Alliant University’s California School of Professional Psychology. His research and writings on dreams have been featured on the Discovery Channel, CNN, and NPR, and his commentary on Post-9/11 nightmares were featured on NBC’s Today Show. Dr. Siegel practices psychotherapy and assessment in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Maniko Dru Dadigan Developing Resonance Awareness: A Whole Person Approach to Voice & Self-Expression

This experiential seminar is an introduction to a whole-person approach to voice that recognizes its essential linking with heart, mind, body, and soul. We review the physiology of the human voice and the breath as they relate to the core body centers of belly, heart and head, and experience our own resonance through the body centers. We track, name, map and connect the images, memories, sensations and emotions that arise, and learn how to further expand and expound, ground and integrate these experiences.
To deepen and expand our experience we also participate in the singing of Mantras. This is a way of introducing what is known to mystics in the East as seed sounds— sounds that activate the universe and through which consciousness becomes manifest in form. Mantras are profoundly archetypal and open doors to magical worlds; they have the potential to connect us to the very source of consciousness. We name for ourselves the states of being that are invoked through this timeless meditation discipline. By practicing awareness, attention, and articulation of these dimensions in ourselves, we begin to understand our unique individuality, the relationship with our soul essence, and how we can experience ourselves more fully.

Maniko Dru Dadigan devotes herself to bridging the wisdom of music and its structure of sound with meditation and healing practices. She has been writing songs and performing for over 25 years, has produced and recorded three CDs of original material, and collaborated with artists such as cellist David Darling, award winner composer & keyboardist Kit Walker, and Mantra singer Deva Premal. Ms. Dadigan offers private sessions in voice & self-expression in Marin County, as well as conducts workshops on voice & self-expression, transformational & ecstatic singing, meditation, and creativity & healing in the US, Europe and Asia.

Fall 2004

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D. Dreaming & Religion in a War-Torn World

This presentation considers the role of dreaming in the world’s religious and spiritual traditions, with special attention to issues of conflict, violence, and war. Throughout history dreams have played a vital role in the world’s major religious traditions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) and have also been central in the spiritual lives of the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. While much is known about dreams in relation to healing, prophecy, and creativity, less is known about their connection to violence, strife, and the darker dimensions of the psyche Jung termed “the shadow.” This presentation argues that dreaming offers a valuable resource not only for understanding the innate human propensity to violence but also for transforming that propensity in the service of a more constructive and life-affirming future.

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in Religion and Psychological Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and is now a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union and a faculty member in the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University. A former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he is author of several books, including Dreams of Healing, Visions of the Night, and An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming.

Jacqueline Thurston, M.A. The Shadow & Spirit Within the Image

Through works of art, we explore the quest to integrate the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea with the inescapable tangible realities of the external world. This presentation explores the potential for a work of art, and the act of art making itself, to become a symbolic container for the artist's experience of mastering and integrating a powerful loss, or a series of losses. This human task integrates experiences of loss with transcendent visions of hope and lies at the very heart of the creative process. Each artist presented, working in a different medium, searched for, and found, images that provided symbolic containers for their experience. The artists have been selected in part because the very medium in which they chose to work served as a metaphor for the symbolic nature of their experiences.

Jacqueline Thurston, M.A., is an artist, writer, performance poet and Professor of Art at San Jose State University. Twice the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her work is in major national and international collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Carnegie Museum, The Library of Congress, The International Museum of Photography, The Oakland Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale. She has appeared as a performance poet at the Ensemble for New Music and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University.

John Beebe, M.D. Psychological Types

Jung's theory of psychological types has reached the wider public through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is used in career counseling, team building in corporate settings, teacher training, and even the construction of characters by Hollywood screenwriters. Few psychologists, however, know how to make typological assessments while working with clients in their offices, without resorting to giving them a self-assessment test. Fewer still know how to use the theory of types to guide their understanding of the process of dynamic psychotherapy, which had been Jung's original intention in making this contribution. This seminar will show how this theory can be used in clinical work.
Suggested background reading: Lectures on Jung's Typology, by Marie Louise von Franz and James Hillman, available from Spring Publications.

John Beebe, M.D., is a Jungian analyst, the Founding Editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, and a past co-editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. He is the author of numerous articles on the anima, film, psychological types, and analysis; an editor of volumes on analytic treatment, and the masculine; and the author of Integrity in Depth; and Terror, Violence, and the Impulse to Destroy. He practices in San Francisco and is a past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

Spring 2004

Jurgen Kremer, Ph.D. Healing Stories from our Ancestors

In indigenous traditions healing, creation myth, ancestry, and place are often interlinked. In the Din (Navajo) tradition healing occurs when people put themselves back to their center of creation and rework their lives from this point of balance and well-being. This happens in the several-days-long chantway ceremonies when a patient sits in the middle of a sandpainting and is “sung over.” Indigenous understanding suggests that remembering one’s ancestry or ancestries, and their mythic stories, is crucial for healing.

In this seminar we explore the transformative power of remembering ancestral connections through storytelling, visualization, and ritual. I use an ethnoautobiographical approach to explore the significance of ancestry for personal and cultural healing, using the example of my Germanic ancestry. Pushing remembrance back to our own indigenous connections is foundational work for an imagination that enables us to heal fractured stories and envision a connection to mythic stories that is not appropriative but instead decolonizing. We need to connect to the earth’s secrets and riches by quietly observing and listening to the spirits of our ancestors and the spirits of place. In this way we enter a dialogue that nurtures all our relatives and releases the suffering we carry. Our spiritual and psychological challenge is to re-imagine ourselves with the ancestral stories we carry, as part of the landscape we live in, and its history.

Jurgen W. Kremer, Ph.D., Diplompsychologe, is an Executive Editor of ReVision, and author of Towards a person-centered resolution of intercultural conflicts. He is former Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Saybrook Institute; Academic Dean, Integral Studies Program, East-West Psychology Program, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS); and Co-Director of the Ph.D. program for Traditional Knowledge, CIIS. He has edited ReVision special issues on Peace and Identity; Paradigmatic Challenges; Culture and Ways of Knowing; Indigenous Science; Trance and Healing; and Transformative Learning.

Meredith Sabini, Ph.D. Field of Dreams

Dreams offer a portal to the whole range of human experience. This seminar covers areas of healing in the field of dreams, including Asklepian healing traditions; “culture dreams” and Native American attitudes toward dreams; objective dreams and the dreaming mind as an information source; and an evolutionary approach to dreams.

Ancient Asklepian and Hippocratic healing traditions included both doctors’ and patients’ dreams; modern versions of these rites and current findings on dreams of illness are discussed. “Culture dreams,” including the prophetic dreams of Black Elk and C. G. Jung, as well as contemporary examples of dreams about 9/11 and the environmental crisis, are discussed. We compare our culture’s avoidant attitude toward dreams with that of the Lenape, Iroquois, and Algonkian, where dreams wove into all aspects of societal functioning.

Jung spoke of “objective” dreams; he also stated that our evolutionary heritage reveals itself in the dreaming mind. The Taoist shaman’s Rainmaker story offers a model for applying a depth psychological approach to environmental and sociopolitical dilemmas. Could we use dreams to gain information and insight into the high rate of breast cancer in Marin County, for example? Recent evidence from neuropsychology and evolutionary psychiatry shows that basic dream themes like falling, being chased, and taking a test correspond to ancient survival patterns. Psychiatrist Anthony Stevens and human ecologist Paul Shepard have suggested that our dreaming mind, now dated at 142 million years, may offer vitally important guidance through this risky period in our species’ survival.

Meredith Sabini, M.A., Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist practicing in the field since 1972. She is author of The earth has a soul: The nature writings of C. G. Jung, and numerous articles on depth psychology. She is the founder of The Dream Institute of Northern California, in Berkeley.

David Tresan, M.D. In the Service of the Natural

Both Freud and Jung start with and then leave the primitive mind behind in the construction of their theories of consciousness. Neither would aver, though, that the primitive no longer resides within us, but because they both portray natural man (and woman) as so elemental and archaic, we are hard put to recognize him or her in us except in a stereotyped and demeaningly inferior way. For both Freud and Jung, the primitive is portrayed primarily as the Paleolithic while the more recent Neolithic, bronze, and iron age human is overlooked.

History tells us that the real story reads otherwise. Natural man and woman, far from only carrying a club or a suckling baby and being garbed in loincloth, gave rise in antiquity to societies and cultures that stand among the most remarkable achievements in the history of humankind. These ancestors still dwell within us and among us, often unrecognized in their ways, and they routinely bring their problems to therapy and analysis. What represents healing for these ubiquitous primitive and not so primitive psyches and aspects of psyches? Is a healed Neanderthal still a Neanderthal, an early Minoan still a Cretan, an ancient Mesopotamian a paradigm for a modern Self in psychotic process, an heroic Homeric man a present-day ever warring egotist? How do such minds think? Is this us?

This talk is part of a work in progress that ranges from psychological considerations of the natural to the transcendent. The pole of interest for this seminar lies in the direction of the former, and exploration together will hopefully shed some light on the earlier phylogenetic levels of development and also provide a deeper and broader context for the individual work we do in the name of psychotherapy and analysis.

David I. Tresan, M.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Mill Valley and San Francisco. His abiding interest lies in the history of ideas and science, the evolution of consciousness, the psychology of the transcendent, and, most importantly, clinical work. He has recently written on religion, neuroscience, and aging in various reviews and papers. A presentation in April, 2003, entitled This New Science of Ours; A More or Less Systematic History of Consciousness and Transcendence, will appear in 2004 in two parts in the spring and summer editions of the Journal of Analytic Psychology.

Fall 2003

Jeffrey Raff, Ph.D. The Two Hands of God: Synchronicity and Meaning

If you like, his quality is the Divine Presence; or if you like, the totality of the Divine Names; or if you like, it is as the Prophet said: “God created Adam according to His Image,” and this is his quality. In creating him, God brought together both His Hands, and therefore we know that He gave him the quality of perfection .. . .He is the totality of the cosmos in terms of its realities, for he is a whole world in himself, while everything else is but a part of the cosmos. Ibn Arabi

Once we lift ourselves out of the box of causal thinking, we see the unfolding of life from a new perspective—what Jung termed synchronicity. Synchronicity is the simultaneous occurrence of inner and outer events that are related by meaning. We explore the nature of meaning, its relationship to life's experiences and methods of discovering it. Revising Jung's theory, Dr. Raff urges a return to the notion of objective Meaning that permeates and guides all of life, and shows the relationship of synchronicity to individuation.

Jeffrey Raff, Ph.D., trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and is in private practice in the Denver area. Author of several articles and books dealing with Jungian psychology, shamanism and alchemy, his publications include Jung and the Alchemical Imagination and The Wedding of Sophia. He is currently working on a book on synchronicity and imagination.

Maureen Murdock, M.A. The Sacred Feminine

Since the first sculpted figures of the Paleolithic era around 20,000 BCE to the current images of the Black Madonna throughout Europe and Central and South America, the sacred feminine manifested in mythological history as the goddess has survived as an expression of the sanctity and unity of life. Although she has gone underground at various points in human history, she has remained active in our deep unconscious, awakening us to her image in our dreams and creative yearnings. In this slide lecture we examine the cultural and archetypal aspects of the sacred feminine represented by such images as the Goddess of Laussel, the Egyptian Isis, the Great Mother of life and death; Sophia-Shekhinah, the Holy Spirit of Wisdom; and the Black Madonna, who calls us to restore the balance so badly needed in our western understanding of God today.

Maureen Murdock, M.A., M.F.T., is a psychotherapist, depth psychology professor and past Chair of the MA Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness; as well as the recently published Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Fathers' Daughters; Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children and The Heroine's Journey Workbook. She is also the editor of Monday Morning Memoirs: Women in the Second Half of Life. In the last five years, Maureen has made pilgrimage to Black Madonna sites in Switzerland, France, and Spain.

Steven Joseph, M.D.

Realizing endlessness within the boundaries of ordinary life:
Psychical experience in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, the Kabbalah of Rabbi A. I. Kook, and the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung

Many traditional sacred psychologies have, as a core motif, an intention of helping spiritual seekers make real the essential purpose of their human existence. This essential purpose is expressed in many different ways in different traditions. One way of saying it is this:

To create a dwelling place within our ordinary everyday living and conscious awareness, for the infinite One that is the unknowable endless mystery, wellspring and unconscious background source of all and everything.

In this workshop we look at teachings from the Sufi master Ibn Arabi, the 20th century Kabbalistic master Abraham Isaac Kook, and depth psychologist Carl Jung, which illustrate and illuminate this core motif.

Steven Joseph, M.D., is a Jungian analyst and board-certified psychiatrist practicing in Albany, CA and Tucson, AZ. He is a member and training analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and the immediate past Editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. He is a long-time student and teacher of the Jewish mystical tradition.

Spring 2003

Joan Chodorow, Ph.D. Emotions and the Archetypal Imagination

For Jung, the emotions are at the foundation of the psyche. They are the source of psychic energy and the higher functions. The natural process of psychological development transforms the emotions into a sensitive network of feelings and complexes and ultimately the highly evolved expressive patterns of human culture. This presentation looks at the nature of the emotions, individually and as a system, with special attention to Joy and Interest as they modulate and transform Grief, Fear, Anger, Disgust (Contempt/ Shame) and Startle. Participants are invited to remember and imagine these universal patterns of expression and transformation. The program includes slides to illustrate.

Joan Chodorow, Ph.D., is an analyst and faculty member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is a registered dance therapist and one of the former presidents of the American Dance Therapy Association. Dr. Chodorow’s publications include Dance therapy and depth psychology: The moving imagination; and an edited volume entitled Jung on active imagination. Her early papers appear in Authentic movement: Essays by Mary Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow. Her forthcoming work is Active imagination: Healing from within. She lectures and teaches internationally.

Neil Russack, M.D. Animals in Art, Dreams, & Life

The animal image is a frequent one in dreams where a particular animal often takes on a symbolic meaning that is not immediately apparent from the way the same animal behaves in life. This seminar presents animals that have played an important role in world art, explores the symbolic status that each of these animal types has assumed in the creative unconscious, and compares the image of the animal to the ways in which the actual animal is encountered in the natural world.

Neil Russack, M.D. is a Jungian analyst practicing in San Francisco, where he is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. As a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, he frequently lectures about animals and nature in the psyche. His book, Animal Guides in Life, Myth and Dreams (An Analyst's Notebook), was recently published.

Bryan Wittine, Ph.D. Archetypal Images of Enlightenment

In this seminar we contemplate archetypal images that represent enlightenment, liberation, or union with God, from mystical traditions across cultures. We discuss Jung’s concept of the transpersonal Self and compare it to the enlightened state that mystics believe is the innermost essence of the mind. Over the centuries, many different images have appeared in the mystical traditions to represent our innermost essence. The enlightened mind is said to be like a jewel with different facets, such as wisdom, compassion, purity, peace, love, freedom, and power. When we contemplate these images as part of disciplined spiritual practice we are brought face to face with vivid representations of who and what we might be when we manifest our deepest human potential. After contemplating these images, we consider how they are used on the path of spiritual transformation, and their relevance to the depth psychological process of individuation.

Bryan Wittine, Ph.D., is a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco and Mill Valley and a member of the teaching faculty at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He has practiced meditation for over 30 years and has been trained in esoteric, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions. Dr. Wittine is a co-founder and former chair of the Graduate Program in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, and former Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Holistic Studies, at John F. Kennedy University. He lectures internationally and has published several papers on the integration of mysticism and depth psychology.

Fall 2002

Steven Joseph, M.D. Kabbalah and Psyche: Reading the Zohar

The Zohar, a mystical book first published in Spain near the end of the 13th century, presents the root teaching of the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah. Among its many profound doctrines, Sefer ha-Zohar (the Book of Radiance / Illumination) teaches about the essential role of human activity and psychical consciousness in sustaining the inner life of Deity.

In this brief introduction to the wisdom of the Zohar, we will look at two short passages about the flow of light (consciousness), vitality and abundance from the infinite depths of Divinity to the finite human world, and the reverse flow from the human psyche to the Divine. My intention is to illustrate the Zohar’s understanding of how God sustains the world and how the world (human beings) sustains God.

Steven Joseph, M.D., is a Jungian analyst and board-certified psychiatrist practicing in Albany, CA and Tucson, AZ. He is a member and training analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, as well as editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. He has been a student and teacher of the Jewish mystical tradition for many years.

Fall 2001

Richard Stein, M.D. The Trickster and Mercurius

To understand Mercurius, we begin with the trickster archetype, which is found in all cultures of the world, and represents the early stirrings of instinctual life, which in humans lead to the impulse for individuality. The androgynous trickster figure, Mercurius, is the central personification of the raw material of the unconscious (prima materia), the process of transformation, and the final goal of a transformed consciousness. Among other things, he is the cultural shadow of the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its polar split between good and evil. Mercurius is both and neither. As in the Grimm’s fairy tale, "The Spirit in the Bottle," he is potentially lethal when released from the depths of the psyche; psychosis and suicide are real possibilities. The integration of such an experience is essential to developing a symbolic attitude.

Richard Stein, M.D. is a Jungian analyst in private practice in San Francisco and a member of the training faculty at the C. G. Jung Institute. In addition to his clinical practice, teaching, and writing, he is an interested practitioner of Vipassana meditation from the Theravada Buddhist tradition.

Dianne Jenett, Ph.D. The Goddess Within: Shakti & Eros in Kerala, India

In Kerala, India, many rituals express the Goddess as woman and woman as Goddess. Ancient but still living traditional practices bring the shakti, or power of the goddess, through men and women's bodies in behalf of the community. Dr. Jenett discusses her work on women's rituals in Kerala, India, where she has interviewed women about their relationship with the goddess and produced video documentation of community rituals.

Dianne Jenett, Ph.D., is a teacher, researcher, and community organizer whose scholarship is centered in rituals in South India, where she spends each spring doing research and participating in community celebrations for the Goddess, and where she also leads educational trips.

Kimmy Johnson, M.A. On the Path of the Ancestors

To stand again in a place of right cultural relationships with one another, we must first recover who we are. To live in consciousness that embraces all beings, we must remember our ancestors. Within our ancestral traditions, sometimes only a few generations back, often far in the mists of prehistory, we find seeds of right relationship with ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world.

We come together in a circle of remembrance, to honor our traditions, our ancestors and the ancestors of this land. Our ancestors are present in this time, in us. S

ome recall a piece of the story from a family history that draws them in. Or there may be a song or a myth that has particular power. Ancestors may already call in voices of the wind, singing of the stars, the resonance of a stone. Each of us will seek footprints that mark the trail. For a few hours, you are invited to be present for these relationships, to follow these footprints.

Kimmy K. Johnson, M.A., teaches at John F. Kennedy University.