Presentation Abstracts from the Brochure, Psychology at the Threshold

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PRESENTATIONS:
Plenary Presentations, Concurrent Talks, Topical Discussions, Workshops, And Performances:

DAVID ABRAM, is a cultural ecologist and philosopher. An accomplished sleight-of-hand magician, he has lived with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.

THE EYE OF THE OTHER ANIMAL OPENS: PSYCHE AND THE WILD ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE Is there a mode of reflection enacted as much by the body as by the mind, informed by the ground and the air and the quality of one’s breathing, by the intensity of one’s contact with the other animate shapes that surround? Might we own up to being sensuous animals, creatures of the earth and water and wind, intoxicated by fire and immersed, along with sea lions and skyscrapers, in the wild psyche of this spinning world?

MICHAEL VANNOY ADAMS, an analyst in training at the C.G. Jung Institute of New York, is the author of The Multicultural Imagination: “Race,” Color, and the Unconscious.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN DREAMING AND THE BEAST OF RACISM In a dream, an African-American woman encounters racism in the image of a lion and other beasts. This presentation is an imaginal interpretation of her dream on both archetypal and cultural levels. To diversify depth psychology and to develop the “multicultural imagination,” depth psychologists must make a serious effort to become culturally knowledgeable.

STEPHEN AIZENSTAT, founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute, has conducted dreamwork seminars throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His original research centers on a psychodynamic process of “tending the living image,” particularly in the context of dreamwork.

DREAMTENDING: AN ARCHETYPAL APPROACH Central to the practice of DreamTending is the notion of the “living image”—the idea that images have body, presence, pulse. The craft of dreamwork is returned to an awareness that our essential psychological spontaneities are rooted most deeply in the psyche of the natural world. From the archetypal perspective, how we listen to a dream (and are listened to) and who we see in a dream (and how we are seen) become as important as what meaning we make out of the dream.

GLORIA ANZALDÚA is a feminist Chicana tejana (Texan) patlache (Nahuatl word for dyke) writer. Among her many books are Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (chosen as one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by both Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader); a bilingual children’s picture book, The Ghost Woman (a Smithsonian Notable Book); and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (co-editor).

CREATIVE ACTS OF VISION This talk focuses on Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “nepantla,” the liminal stages of transition that describe how we create identity and art and how we practice spiritual activism.

CHARLES ASHER, Pacifica’s Provost, is a Jungian analyst and an Oblate of the Order of St. Benedict, Camaldolese. He is author of The Contemplative Self and Soundings.

A QUIXOTIC VISION IN THE NEW DARK AGES How do we sally forth in these new dark ages? Or do we? Does James Hillman’s archetypal psychology suggest the emergence of a new St. Benedict--a contemporary Don Quixote who imagines a new way of seeing what is and what is possible? Through an archetypal contemplative approach, this lecture jousts with darkness and light, illusion and reality, contemplation and action on life’s surprising and unexpected journey.

GUSTAVO BARCELLOS is a Jungian analyst in São Paulo and a member of the Associacao Junguiana do Brasil. He writes and teaches in the field of archetypal psychology and is the translator of James Hillman's works.

THE UNDISCOVERED SOUL: THE BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE The last 15 years saw archetypal psychology's ideas growing stronger in the Brazilian Jungian community, but Brazilian South American syncretic polytheistic culture shines and awaits to be discovered by the Jungian community at large. It is now time to evaluate where and how archetypal psychology was accepted or rejected in Brazil, as well as to call attention to the Brazilian way of imagining soul, affection, culture and psychology.

JOHN BEEBE is President-elect of the C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco and Founding Editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. He is the author of the book, Integrity in Depth.

NOT JUST THE HERO'S STORY: A NEW LOOK AT FILM NARRATIVE The hero mono-myth described by Joseph Campbell has dominated 20th century film. Now, in a more complex, multicultural time, moviemakers throughout the world are looking toward the plural realities of the psyche. Using clips from classic and recent films, Dr. Beebe will demonstrate a post-heroic model of narrative that opens the way to a new view of individuation.

PATRICIA BERRY, past President of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, is current President of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts. She is the author of Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology.

IMAGE IN MOTION Archetypal Psychology’s notion of “image” implies motion. For psychic life to thrive most fruitfully in the hermetically challenging 2000’s, psychology’s perspectives and constructs need strike new postures, tensions, balances. Techniques and principles from the arts, from ‘moving pictures’ as well as the movement within pictures/paintings, train the eye to motions necessary for revisioning depth psychology as an art. This talk aims to contribute to archetypal psychology’s artistic pillage.

PETER BISHOP is Associate Professor in Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. Among his books are The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape, The Greening of Psychology, and An Archetypal Constable: National Identity and the Geography of Nostalgia.

THE DEATH OF SHANGRI-LA AND THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION Shangri-La, the final western utopia of the second millennium, conforms to a deep archetypal pattern whose traces can be found in 20th century film, novel, travel, politics, religion, environmentalism, advertising and cyberspace. What is the fate of this story in an era that has all but eliminated the possibility of an Earth-bound, uncharted hidden valley? Must any new utopian myth rely on a general re-enchantment of the Earth, or does hope for such a place lie in the de-territorialized realms of cyberspace?

MERMER BLAKESLEE has published two novels: Same Blood (Houghton Mifflin) and In Dark Water (Ballantine) which was selected by Barnes and Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series. In 1998 she was awarded a New York Foundation of the Arts fiction fellowship She is currently working on a new novel and a non-fiction book, A Conversation with Fear.

WRONG LOVE Mermer Blakesee will read from her work, choosing portions that reflect some of the images, ideas and questions arising in the symposium.

ALAN BLEAKLEY is a Senior Lecturer in Medical Education and Medical Humanities at the University of Plymouth, Postgraduate Medical School. His latest book is The Animalizing Imagination.

RE-POSITIONING THE RAT MAN: ANIMAL RITES IN THE CYBORG AGE This talk revisions Freud’s case studies of animal phobia in the light of contemporary ideas, from thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, on the animalizing imagination as a central force in an age dominated by the human/machine/information complex.

ROBERT BLY is a poet, translator and teacher of fairytales. His recent publications include The Maiden King: The Reunion of the Masculine and Feminine with Marion Woodman and two books of poetry: Eating the Honey of Words: New Selected Poems and translations of the ghazals of Ghalib, The Lightening Should Have Fallen on Ghalib with Sumil Dutta.

ISEULT AND THE BADGER: 40 AMERICAN GHAZALS Robert Bly will read from an unpublished new book of his own poems which remain in that space of the soul torn between the earthly world and the divine world.

ROBERT BOSNAK, a Jungian Analyst, is the author of A Little Course in Dreams and Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming. He is director of a website facilitating online dreamwork, developing emotion recognition technology for computers and providing a forum for reflection on the location of the Web in the imaginal.

SOUL IN NEW THE MLLENNIUM OF VIRTUAL PRESENCE What constitutes presence in a world with a radically new dimension created by the non-locality of the Internet and its undoubtable descendents? What implications does this new dimension have for society and soul? What mythography-in-the-making is written in the Web c.s.? How might it affect the world’s wide variety of cultures?

EDWARD S. CASEY, is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. He is currently engaged in exploring the unsuspected power of the human glance, especially as it relates to diverse aspects of art, social life and ecology. His books include Getting Back into Place, The Fate of Place, and Spirit and Soul.

GLANCING AT THE PLACE OF SOUL IN THE ENVIRONMENT This talk will explore the role of vision and, more particularly, the glance in the perception of the environment, with special attention as to how an imperative to ameliorate environmental problems is conveyed to the look of those who have eyes to see. The approach will be at once ecological, aesthetical, philosophical and psychological.

JOAN CHODOROWis a dance therapist and Jungian analyst in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the Editor of C.G. Jung on Active Imagination and author of Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology: The Moving Imagination.

AFFECT AND ARCHETYPE: FOUNDATIONS OF THE PSYCHE The primal affects are transformed through curiosity, play and imagination toward the higher functions of the psyche and the ultimate values of human culture. This talk will present Lou Stewart’s theoretical synthesis of Darwin, Jung, Henderson, Hillman, Tomkins and others concerning affective development. The synthesis will be updated from the perspective of recent studies on affect.

NOEL COBB co-founded The London Convivium for Archetypal Studies and co-edited the journal, SPHINX, both with Eva Loewe. In l995 he created THIASOS, an independent, British, post-graduate teaching program in archetypal and cultural psychology. He is the author of Archetypal Imagination—Glimpses of the Gods in Life and Art.

MIRRORS, YOU KNOW, ARE ONLY A SPECIAL KIND OF GLASS In this talk, Noel Cobb suggests that psychotherapy-training, by over-emphasizing professionalism, has lost its soul. A new paradigm is called for, such as adapting the mentor-apprenticeship style of shamanism. Here, a person learns by following death ‘through the mirror’ into a country where ‘last things are first’. Only then, is one ‘qualified’, not in the art and poetics of ‘phoenixology’, but in a psychotherapy attuned to anima mundi.

ANDREI CODRESCU, is a critic, poet, humorist and author of two best-selling novels, The Blood Countess (1995) and Messiah (1999). An emigrant from Romania, he is currently a regular commentator on National Public Radio and Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

SOME POETIC ESCAPES FROM QUOTATION MARKS The last third of the 20th century has inserted, with blatant cynicism, quotation marks around most of our cherished notions of social, political, historical and psychological existence. Indeed, the whole notion of what a human being is in the age of cloning, cyberspace and public opinion polls has undergone a radical transformation. This lecture suggests some poetic escapes from quotation marks with the help of C.G. Jung and James Hillman.

JOSEPH COPPIN, a practicing psychotherapist for 25 years, is Chair of the Depth Psychology Program at Pacifica. He teaches courses in culture, clinical practice, and in research from a depth perspective.

THE WILDLIFE OF WORDS Language as a tool for communication is a comforting fantasy for the intellect and the ego. This presentation will take the view that language is a living presence with its own sensibilities, desires and tensions, and that we are the tools of language rather than the other way round. Examples will be drawn from Hillman, Nor Hall, Russell Lockhart, and from other realms of literature.

WILLIAM G. DOTY is Professor of Humanities at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. His many books include Myths of Masculinity and Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. He currently edits Mythosphere: A Journal for Image, Myth, and Symbol and has edited Picturing Cultural Values in Postmodern America, and (with W. J. Hynes) Mythical Trickster Figures.

THE ARTIST’S WORK, 1975-2025 Invoking Janus, Professor Doty will talk about human imagination and praxis in the arts. Looking back, he will consider the socio-historical frameworks in which cultural expressions have appeared. Looking forward, he asks: What new values follow in our postmodern climate, such as artwork being collaborative and community-based? How might future educational nuturings of imagination return us to the mytho-history of humankind as contrasted to the individualized, fragmented self of modern experience?

CHRISTINE DOWNING is a member of Pacifica’s core faculty and former Chair of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. Her nine books include The Goddess; Myths & Mysteries of Same-Sex Love; Gods in Our Midst and The Long Journey Home.

“SAD IS EROS, BUILDER OF CITIES” - W.H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” Freud writes, at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, “Now it is to be hoped that the other of the two heavenly powers, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary, Death. But who can foresee with what success and with what results?” At the threshold of a new millennium, Christine Downing shares Freud’s skepticism and his hope.

RICHARD FRANKEL is a psychotherapist and author of The Adolescent Psyche: Jungian and Winnicottian Perspectives. He is an adjunct professor at Smith Social Work School and at Pacifica.

ADOLESCENCE AND THE IMAGINAL ATTEMPT TO CONTAIN AMERICAN SHADOW To understand school violence, we must include not only the facts of the actual killings but also the fantasy-images that are engaging young killers and the social and political context of these events. School massacres force us to re-imagine psychological practice, taking into account the suffering adolescent’s experience at the hands of a culture at war with itself. This suffering cannot be reduced to brain chemistry, early childhood experience, or family dynamics.

ROBERTO GAMBINI is a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst in São Paulo, Brazil and the author, most recently, of Indian Mirror - The Making of the Brazilian Soul.

THE ALCHEMY OF CEMENT IN A MODERN CITY With works of art, this presentation will illustrate how the technically insoluble problems of São Paulo, the third largest city in the world, are being worked out at a deep level of the city’s unconscious. What comes out is that cement, the prima materia of the city, has to undergo a series of alchemical transformations until a lost soul is extracted from the dead material and brought back to life in a renewed concept of city. The approach is to use Jungian psychology to understand how the soul is affected by the environment and how it can be revalued.

WOLFGANG GIEGERICH is a Jungian analyst in private practice near Munich. He has taught in many countries, lectured at Eranos and is the author of more than one hundred publications. His two most recent books are The Soul’s Logical Life and Der Jungsche Begriff der Neurose.

THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS C.G. Jung’s psychology of the unconscious was meant to be the modern vessel for the same soul substance that formerly had had its authentic life in myth, religion and metaphysics. Is this transmutation into psychology the natural outcome of the soul’s historical self-development, or was the psychology of the unconscious a new construction? Was the “unconscious” itself invented rather than discovered? Is Jung’s psychology project a light that illuminated this crazy, catastrophic century or is it only another expression of the darkness of “our benighted days”? On the answer to these questions depends the future of Jungian psychology.

ANDRÉ GREGORY, is a distinguished film and stage actor and director. In the ‘90’s he directed the play version of Vanya on 42nd Street and co-directed the film version with Louis Malle. Currently he is directing Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner and Ibsen’s Master Builder.

BONE SONGS André Gregory will read from his play, Bone Songs, inspired by his marriage and the loss of his wife. The play, a series of love songs inspired by Solomon’s Song of Songs, will be the catalyst for this workshop to explore creativity, personal terrors and the most terrifying world of all, the world of the ecstatic.

ALLAN GUGGENBÜHL, a Jungian psychotherapist and director of the Institute of Conflict Management and Mythodrama in Switzerland, is an internationally acknowledged expert on violence among adolescents. His publications include The Incredible Fascination of Violence and Men, Myth, Power.

PERSONAL SCANDALS & STORIES OF HORROR: THE DRAMA OF ABUSE Sexual abuse, violence and scandal: society's concern for issues of abuse and horror is obvious. These preoccupations do not merely reflect actual happenings, but are manifestations of the soul’s need for trauma. In the future psychology will have to give more importance to these modern, abysmal stories and conceive them as modern myths, which help us to confront the collective unconsciousness and our shadow.

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