Saturday, July 24  | 12:00pm - 1:30pm, Eastern Time

SAVE THE DATE!

Bundles of Darkness/Moments of Meeting: The Despoiled and Present State of the Soul, The C.G. Jung Birthday Fundraising Lecture with Dr. James Hollis

The Jung Society of Washington presents our annual celebration of the birthday of Carl Jung (July 24) with a free lecture by the internationally known and highly regarded Jungian author and analyst, Dr. James Hollis.

Our lecture is a free program and a fundraiser — a gift to all who need or want one and an expression of thanks to our Jung Society of Washington community.  We’re offering it free to people who want to dip their toes into Jung, but can’t commit, or to people who just need a free program for whatever reason.  These last few years we all just need a little support sometimes, and we want you to know that we are delighted and grateful to have you with us!

We are also asking that if this is not the time that you need support, that you consider supporting us with a donation.  Sometimes people reach to us for economic support to join our programs.  Donations offered in thanks for this lecture will support our Annual Fund, a portion of which supports of our "scholarship fund,” allowing us to extend programs to people who are otherwise not able to join us.  If ever we have doubted, these past years have convinced us of the critica importance of the inner journey.

Please join us.  Your presence and your generosity are greatly appreciated.  As always — and we can't say this often enough — we thank you for your continued participation in and support of the Jung Society of Washington.

Program Description: The erosion of contemporary institutions and mythic structures triggers both the loss of meaning and the summons to go within to recover a link to the numinous.  The appearance and disappearance of the gods is described in order to dismantle and critique the ego’s futile management systems.  Finally, the mystery of meaning is revealed as something that rises autonomously from the psyche of the individual and links the person to the transcendent, for a while.

________________________________________

Four Tuesdays, June 6 - 27  | 7:30pm - 9:30pm, Eastern Time

Sacred Threads: An Archetypal Approach to Discerning and Deepening Your Spiritual Journey, a course with Jennifer Selig

I primarily define spirituality as that feeling of being connected to something beyond our small selves and beyond the mundane plane in which we typically live our lives. That thing could be God or the Goddess, Nature, a Higher Power, or other glorious Beings on this earth and beyond. I also appreciate Brené Brown’s definition of spirituality:

Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.

If Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is right when he observed that “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience” but rather “we are spiritual beings having a human experience,” then it would benefit us to spend some time contemplating our spiritual journey, which is to contemplate our spiritual being. I believe that such contemplation, where we look at our personal journeys through an archetypal lens, can help us understand where we have been and inspire us going forward toward more of Brown’s perspective, meaning, and purpose. Certainly, this sort of contemplation is what Jung did in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which will be our core text for this program.

________________________________________

Friday, June 23  | 7:30pm - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

The C.G. Jung Memorial Lecture: Opening the Closed Heart: Meetings with the Human and Archetypal Child in the Psychotherapy of Early Trauma with Donald E. Kalsched

The process of realizing oneself as a person (“individuation”) was for C. G. Jung equivalent to the unfolding of latent potentials in the personality--a vital spark of aliveness--something sacred and utterly unique in each of us. The potential for this “unfolding,” Jung felt, lay deep in the foundations of the personality, like a seed, and was universally represented in mythology as the archetype of the innocent orphaned child in exile. 

Trauma in childhood accounts for such exile.  By studying the lives of people who have survived early trauma, we discover that the ideal “unfolding” of the personality Jung envisioned is partially blocked and distorted by powerful-but-necessary archetypal defenses. These defenses divide up the inner world and banish unbearably painful feelings to the unconscious where they continue to live in “suspended animation” as implicit memories or as the orphaned specters of a traumatic childhood.  When psychotherapy begins, these wounded, ghost-like remnants of our childhood selves re-emerge, seeking acceptance and healing.  If accepted, they also bring with them a numinous, ineffable dimension that often accompanies the experience of healing.

However, the recovery of these lost parts of the self is often strongly resisted by the psyche’s defensive powers and their organization in a “system” (Self-Care System) of both protection and persecution. Successful psychotherapy depends on our understanding of these dynamics.

________________________________________

Saturday, June 24  | 1:00pm - 4:00pm, Eastern Time

The Carl Jung Memorial Workshop: Working with the Self Care System with Donald E. Kalsched

The battle that emerges in trauma therapy between feeling- and anti-feeling powers as they find their way into the analytic partnership is one that Jung seldom described and is much stormier than the benign “unfolding” of human potential he sometimes described as “individuation.”   To understand the human and archetypal “children” in the psyche (and their split-off vulnerable feelings), we must also understand the human and archetypal oppressors of these “children” (and their violent, attacking energies). This will require a re-visioning of Analytical Psychology in light of contemporary findings about affect and defense in the earliest years of child development, when intractable dissociative defenses and their organizing “systems” are formed. 

In this workshop we will explore various clinical examples of the “stormy negotiation” between the analytic partners for the release of the psyche’s “children.”

________________________________________

Four Wednesdays, July 5 - 26 | 7:30pm - 9:30pm, Eastern Time

A Jungian Exploration of Tarot Imagery: Divination, Synchronicity, and the Transcendent Function, a course with Ken James

In this short course, we will study the Tarot, a seventy-eight-card deck used for divination and as the foundation for an esoteric version of Jung’s active imagination technique. Participants will be instructed on the complex structure of the Tarot and its correlation with Analytical Psychology’s theories regarding the structure and function of the psyche.

We will elaborate on the use of the Tarot for divination, scrutinizing its relationship with the concept of synchronicity. Further, we will delve into the Major and Minor Arcana, evaluating their collective and personal unconscious representation, respectively.

This course will also illuminate the connection between the Transcendent Function and the utilization of Tarot cards to augment intuitive comprehension of internal and external dynamics. Participants will be guided in executing a three-card reading addressing a particular issue, with practical demonstrations provided within the class for better understanding.

It is recommended that each participant come prepared with a Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, as this deck will be the foundation of class discussions and sample readings. The rationale behind this specific deck selection will be elucidated during the course. This endeavor will provide participants with an enriched understanding of the Tarot's role in divination, the study of psyche, and personal introspection.

________________________________________

Friday, July 7  | 7:30pm - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

An Evening With Larry Staples: Tearing Down Walls: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

My presentation will focus on my most recent book, Tearing Down Walls: Ich Bin Ein Berliner. 

This book is about some of the work we need to do in order to become all that we can be.  Like Berlin, we all have a wall, an inner wall that separates us from ourselves and imposes a formidable limit on what we can become.  It’s a wall that needs to be torn down.  We built this wall at an early age when socialization began and we needed a barrier behind which we could hide that part of ourselves that was unacceptable to our parents and important others.  We hid that part of us in order to be loved.

Like us, Berlin started out as a unified whole.  Then, like us, a wall was erected that split it in two.  To become one again, the wall had to be torn down and the darker side, the East side, had to be brought into the light and developed.

 
Berlin, thus, is a metaphor for the enlargement of personality that can occur when we, like Berlin’s inhabitants, tear down that wall and become bigger, richer, freer, and more diverse and democratic.  In this sense we are all potentially Berliners.
 
The catalyst for this book was a powerful dream that contained a biblical image that suggested Berlin may well serve as a symbol of the Self, a stunning creative entity extremely diverse in its makeup, containing all the opposites, the contradictions, and the paradoxes found in great creations.