Fall 2008 Program

Friday Lecture, September 26, 7:30 PM
Patricia Sohl, M.D., M.P.H.
Quotidian Conversations Working with Symbolic Images in Individuation

The deeper layers of our psyches are constantly communicating with us via symbols. Amid the demands of everyday life we may notice this only in passing, usually first giving it our attention after a dream presents us with particularly enigmatic images and we wonder what it all might mean. This lecture is offered as a small retreat in which we will take the opportunity to look at the symbolic process, the basis of Jung’s work.

We will begin by viewing a profound 28-minute film in which Yo Yo Ma introduces his friend David Blum, also a professional musician. David explains how, when he left the security of his preferred language of expression, music, and dared to pick up some children’s pastels to draw scenes from his dreams, he unwittingly engaged in conversation with his inner self. We follow him as he shows us his pictures and talks movingly about his own skepticism, shyness, curiosity, and wonder, and the unexpected reward of finding a layer of rich meaning in his colorful, naively-styled pictures. In our discussion of this moving film, we will review Jung’s ideas about symbolic images and include some of the newer findings from brain research, which unite cognition and emotion. Please join us as David Blum draws his dreams and tells us about an amazing meeting with a very wise old dog.

About the Speaker:

Patricia Sohl is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and received her advanced degrees at the Harvard University School of Public Health and the Tufts University School of Medicine. She has an analytic practice in Palo Alto and is Curator of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism at the C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco.

Friday Lecture, October 17, 7:30 PM
Saturday Workshop, October 18, 10-3
Patricia Damery, M.A.
The Secret of the Golden Flower & the Mandala: Jung’s Entry into Alchemy and the Formation of the Subtle Body

Upon first reading Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the Taoist text, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Carl Jung stated that he “devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center.” Seldom studied but seminal in Jung’s work, this Taoist text was Jung’s introduction to alchemy. In Friday evening’s lecture we will study the series of ten mandalas which Jung felt reflected the principles and processes in the text, which addresses the archetypal process of the formation of the subtle body, an aspect of the shamanic archetype. In Saturday’s workshop we will consider the text itself, reading portions of Wilhelm’s and Taoist scholar Thomas Cleary’s translations. Hopefully we can approach this enigmatic text in an introverted spirit of contemplation and reflection.

About the Speaker:

Patricia Damery is a writer and an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, in private practice in Napa, CA. She has written several articles on the shamanic archetype, including “Window on Eternity” or “The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Personal Amplification,” which appeared in Psychological Perspectives, Vol. 1, 2006.

Note: The speaker suggests that workshop participants have copies of both texts:

• The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, translated into German by Richard Wilhelm, translated into English by Cary F. Baynes, this edition by Tung-Pin Lu. Harcourt Brace and Co. 1962. ISBN 0-15-679980-4
• The Secret of the Golden Flower: The Classic Book of Life, translated by Thomas Cleary. Harper San Francisco, 1991 ISBN 0-06-250193-3

Friday Lecture, November 14, 7:30 PM
Michael Gellert, M.A., L.C.S.W.
The Way of the Small: Why Less is Truly More

“The goal is to make the ego as strong and as small as possible.” —C. G. Jung
Our best traditions and thinkers tell us that happiness is found in “the small” —in celebrating the details of everyday life and living wisely with limits. They teach us the joys of simplicity and modesty, and that by embracing diminishing experiences, we can make our suffering sacred. By promoting a sound, wholesome existence for both the individual and society, this perennial teaching offers a viable alternative to the grandiose thinking that is responsible for so many of our personal and global problems. In exploring this archetype of the small, our aim will be to understand why very little is needed to make a happy life.

About the Speaker:

Michael Gellert is a Jungian analyst practicing in Los Angeles and Pasadena, and former Director of Training of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. He is the author of Modern Mysticism, The Fate of America, and The Way of the Small.

Saturday, December 6, 6–9 PM
Annual Holiday Dinner
St. Peter’s Church, 334 14th Street, Del Mar

We invite all members and friends to join us for good food and fellowship at our annual Holiday Dinner. Please bring a potluck dish to serve 6-8 people. Beverages and desserts will be provided by the Friends of Jung Board. Ron Strange will return from Port Townsend, Washington to give a slide presentation titled: “All Who Wander Are Not Lost: Walking Across and Driving Around Scotland.” Join us to follow Ron’s eclectic journey along the Whiskey Trail to Neolithic Orkney, a Templar chapel, and places in between.

Friday Lecture, January 16, 7:30 PM
Saturday Workshop, January 17, 10-3
Thomas Patrick Lavin, Ph.D.
Sins of Obedience: Giving Too Much to God and Caesar

Why can’t you just do what you are told? This is the question many of us heard often between our pre-kindergarten and post-graduate rites of initiation. Obeying the “powers that be” seemed a necessary stage in adjusting to the demands and expectations of the collective into which we were born. Until—like the prophet Samuel and the Irish poet W. B. Yeat’s “Wandering Angus”—we heard our name called by a new voice and knew we had to spend the rest of our lives following that voice. For Samuel, the voice belonged to the Divine or what Jung called the “vox dei hypothesis of conscience.” For Angus, the voice belonged to his soul, symbolized by a beautiful, glimmering girl; the voice of conscience felt as “a collision of consciousness with a numinous archetype” (C. W. 10, para 854).

What voice calls each of us by name? Dare we obey it? Can we give too much credence to voices having dubious moral authority? When should we dare to withdraw from a job, a person, or an institution? This lecture will discuss how we might discern the different voices which call to us. Some speak with moral authority and yet should not be obeyed. Other voices, like the one Samuel heard in the night, are soft and steady and call us to move beyond morality to our own ethos, and finally toward the creative energy of an inner beloved.

Our discussion will be rooted in some of Jung’s ethical inferences contained in A Psychological View of Conscience. Growth toward wholeness demands that our conscience grow into an internal experience which transcends ego rigidity and embraces both conscious and unconscious reality. The transcendent function may be our best ally when we have conflicts of duty between God and Caesar. Our development of a conscience-vision from a moral, to an ethical, to an immanent/transcendent conscience is a core experience of the individuation process. This theme will be introduced in the Friday night lecture and continued in the Saturday Workshop.

About the Speaker:

Thomas Lavin holds Ph.D. degrees in Clinical Psychology and in Moral Theology from the University of Innsbruck in Austria and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He has worked as a clinical psychologost for the U.S. Army in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland and is a Senior Analyst with the C. G. Jung Insitute of Chicago. He works as a consultant to the North Chicago Veteran’s Administration Medical Center and maintains a private practice in Wilmette, Illinois.

Upcoming in Winter/Spring 2009

To whet your appetite, here are a few of the presentations we have planned for the next season.

• Friday Lecture and Saturday Workshop
  February 13 & 14, 2009
  Frank Dowling, M.A. Education and M.A. Theology
  Casablanca: The Film and Its Symbols
• Friday Lecture, March 20, 2009
  Patricia Ariadne, Ph.D.
  Women Dreaming-into-Art:
  Two Artists Who Create from Dreams
• Friday Lecture, April 17, 2009
  Nard Michaels, M.S.W., L.C.S.W.
  Sports and Psyche
  

Lecture Recordings

Audio recordings of each FOJ lecture can be pre-purchased on the night of the lecture for $10. and will be mailed to you shortly afterward in CD format. In addition, you may order a copy of any past lecture in this season’s schedule by sending a check for $10. per lecture, payable to The Friends of Jung, to:
P. O. Box 2363
Del Mar, CA 92014-1663

Quotes from Jung

I am of the opinion that the psyche is the most powerful fact in the human world. It is indeed the mother of all human facts, of culture and of murderous wars.
—C. G. Jung, from Psychology and Alchemy, 1944

If the repressed tendencies—the shadow, as I call them—were decidedly evil, there would be no problem whatever. But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains inferior, childish, or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but “it is not done.”
—C. G. Jung, from Psychology and Religion, 1940.

We always proceed on the naive assumption that we are masters in our own house. The first thing we have to do is accustom ourselves to the idea that, even in our most intimate psychic life, we live in a kind of house through the doors and windows of which we look out upon a world, and that the objects or contents of this world, although profoundly affecting us, do not belong to us.
—C. G. Jung, from “The Relations between the Ego an the Unconscious,” 1928, revised in Coll. Works, Vol. 7.

We can understand why the inner friend so often appears as an enemy, and why he is so far away and his voice so low. “Who is near to Him is near to the fire.”
—C. G. Jung, from “Concerning Rebirth,” 1940, revised 1950, Coll. Works, Vol. 9,