This course will meet on 4 consecutive Tuesdays:  April 7, 14, 21 and 28, 2026, 7:30PM-9:30PM

This program WILL BE RECORDED.

Who was Erich Neumann, one of Jung’s closest friends, though 30 years younger than Jung? How do Neumann’s life experiences spanning the Holocaust and World War II echo much of the chaos and evil we are experiencing today?

Neumann escaped Berlin in 1933 for Palestine, where he produced a large body of work focused on Judaism, consciousness, creativity, and evil. After we are introduced to this brilliant Jungian, we will first probe his own inner process of transformation as seen through his active-imagination watercolor paintings.

Then we will explore Neumann’s lifelong endeavor— understanding human psychological development from birth to old age – by focusing on the important questions about why we do what we do, how to change those patterns, and how change impacts our relationship to the greater Self and to “God.”

It was Neumann who came up with the concept of the ego-Self axis. He was personally challenged to try to understand both the world during WWII and why the psychology of his time changed so radically, just as it has for us today.  He explored the process of normal and changing development through his books, Psychology and the New Ethic; The Origins and History of Consciousness; The Great Mother; Amor and Psyche; The Fear of the Feminine; and in his more recently published works, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness: Vol.1: Revelation and Apocalypse; Vol.2: Hasidism; and Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif.

Neumann’s seminal ideas will provide us food for understanding and discussion. We will also discuss what happens when the process goes wrong, as explained in his papers on “Narcissism” and “Mass Man.” Finally, we will discuss Neumann’s interest in the uniqueness of the “creative individual” and the “nature of creativity itself,” through which potent and transformative images and symbols emerge to impact the individual and the greater collective. These ideas will be grounded through examples from artists and their art.

Prices:

Non-Member:  $135.00/ticket

Individual Member:  $100.00/ticket

Senior 65+/Student Members:  $80.00/ticket

Nancy Swift Furlotti, Ph.D.,  is a Jungian analyst living in Aspen, CO. She is a past president of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, a founding member and past president of the Philemon Foundation, and a member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado and the Interregional Association of Jungian Analysts. She also serves on the boards of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA; The Smithsonian National Asian Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Mercurius Prize Committee in Zurich. Dr. Furlotti has written numerous articles and edited several books, including The Dream and Its Amplification with the late Erel Shalit. Among her books are Eternal Echoes: Consciousness, Creativity, and Evil; and most recently The Splendor of the Maya: A Journey into the Shadows at the Dawn of Creation. She also lectures internationally on Jungian topics, such as dreams, mythology, consciousness, the feminine, and psychedelics. Dr. Furlotti’s company, Recollections, LLC, edits and publishes first-generation Jungian's unpublished writings. For example, Erich Neumann’s two-volume manuscript, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, was published in English, Hebrew, and German. She participated in the recent publications of Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung and of Jung’s Last Lectures. She has a long history of interest in Neumann’s works, beginning in 2004 when, at Philemon, she and then-president Steve Martin succeeded in publishing the correspondence between Neumann and Jung.