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ABOUT US
The Jung Society of Washington is dedicated to nourishing the human spirit and to serving the longing that comes to us in our dreams and in moments of hardship, imagination, struggle, and creativity. We support the exploration of our own psychic depths and the primal impulse for personality integration that Dr. Carl Gustav Jung called "individuation".
With a psychological lens, we deepen the discussion of social issues, history, and current events. We encourage the development of greater self-awareness and creative expression—individually, in relationships, and within the community.
The Jung Society of Washington is guided by a desire to enhance a deeper understanding of the unconscious dynamics that course through our personal lives, our culture, and our historic patterns. Through programs, classes, visiting speakers, online media, and partnerships with like-minded organizations, we strive to create a forum where the principles, insights, and tools of analytical psychology are accessible to both the general public and to professionals.
Our goal is to provide continuous education for living a purposeful and creative life and for building a more conscious and thoughtful community.
The Jung Society provides the general public and the professional community with the insights and tools of analytical psychology and related disciplines. Through programs, classes, visiting speakers, partners in like organizations, and electronic media, the Jung Society provides a platform for communal discussion regarding the personal and professional issues that confront us. The tools that these programs provide assist individuals, relationships, and societies in a dialogue that enhances understanding the unconscious dynamics that course through personal lives, cultural problems, and historic patterns.
LECTURES & WORKSHOPS
Lectures are given by Jungian analysts and usually occur on Friday Night. They offer a 90-minute program that includes a question-and-answer session (Q & A).
Workshops are generally half-day programs held the day following lectures. Participants have the opportunity to discuss the themes in the lecture (and usually a second presentation by the analyst) with the presenter, and are encouraged to bring their journals.
Occasionally, we offer a Workshop with a Jungian scholar who is not an analyst, or a specialist in a field close to Jungian work (e.g., astrology, Tarot, Kabbalah, etc.).
COURSES & FILM NIGHTS
Courses comprise three to six regularly scheduled sessions held weekly or bi-weekly. The sessions may be either one-and-a-half or two hours in length, depending on the instructor and the topic.
Film Nights are usually intended for small groups and held in the Jung Society Library. We discontinued Film Nights with the onset of the Pandemic, but we hope to revive them soon.
AN EVENING WITH....
The “An Evening With …” style program was born of the idea that we have found a person with an interesting Jung-adjacent idea to share. They may be new to the Jung Society of Washington, or offering something adjacent to Jungian work. It is a 90-minute session held on Zoom. These sessions allow time to engage the speaker.
Find all your scheduled programs and expand your minds with us on this amazing journey.
Each year, Jung Society of Washington is proud to offer:
Our Vision for the Jung Society's Future
We envision Jung Society of Washington as an ongoing extensive online community and programs, as well as an eventual center with a building, a moderate endowment, support of the analyst training process, several outreach programs, paid full time staff, libraries, spaces for expressive art classes and art exhibits, and a well-established community and online presence. This is a broad and optimistic vision, and with your help, we are moving toward this vision.
In recent weeks, we all watched a handcuffed, middle-aged black man slowly die, asphyxiated by a white policeman because of a twenty-dollar bill; we watched a young black man die by shot gun, having been chased by three white men (one a former policeman) in trucks because he was running in the “wrong” neighborhood; and we read about the killing of a young black woman awakened in her home at night and shot eight times by police who had broken into the wrong apartment. Even more recently a black man, asleep in his car, was awakened and ultimately shot dead as he ran from white police. And then there are the reports of five black men, found separately, hanging — each dead in a tree — all of which were officially declared “suspected suicides.” We are shocked, sickened, disheartened, sad, distraught, and guilty.
As Jung wrote in After the Catastrophe, white people are “possessed” by feelings of superiority to people of color, and the crimes that we and our forebears have committed against our darker brothers and sisters are “legion.“
Our savage atrocities are uncountable. In the unilluminated regions of our own souls, our felt superiority secretly thrives, fed by hidden shadows. But then we see it, close up, on our screens, and we hear it. We are horrified and shamed. We suspect our own complicit guilt, our own evil, but how do we live with it?
Dare we claim it? And what if we dare not?
Our profound immorality causes profound suffering, the depth of which we can imagine only barely. Yet we cannot undo, cannot resurrect, cannot heal, or even compensate. We join our voices with those of protesters against what we have witnessed and finally confessed: Black lives matter; let them breathe!
April Barrett, President, Board of Directors
Jung Society of Washington
June 2020
"The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict."
- C.G. Jung, Aion, CW 9ii
