Presentation Abstracts from the Symposium, Psychology at the Threshold

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

NOR HALL is a psychotherapist in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her books include The Moon & the Virgin, ThoseWomen and The End of the Iron Age, an epic poem. For ten years she has been a contributor to Pantheatre’s Myth & Theater festivals. Recently she has been writing plays and playing with performance art.

PERSONS AS GESTURES: IMAGINAL PSYCHOLOGY ON STAGE Archetypal psychology, through its practitioners, has had a long time affair with the French Pantheatre and its stateside soul-mate, Archipelago Theater Company in North Carolina, committed to the intelligence of the body, the warmth of the heart and the passion of poesis. With appreciative nod to Hillman’s writing on Persons as Faces, Hall will discuss the development of an image or idea into a moment on stage, paying particular attention to Archipelago’s understanding of each actor’s gestural world.

KAZUHIKO HIGUCHI, a Jungian analyst since1983, is president of the Kyoto Bunkyo University and the C.G. Jung Club in Japan. He is also vice president of the International Society of Sand Play Therapy in Kyoto, Japan.

SELF-EXPRESSION IN FANTASY GROUP “Fantasy Group,” founded and developed by Kazuhiko Higuchi in Kyoto, is a group art therapy techniqueinfluenced by archetypal psychology. In describing the processes of group sessions, Dr Higuchi will speak about the power of images, fantasy, remembering and forgetting, the unexpected symbols from the depth, and death poems in Haiku: dying in beauty.

LAURENCE HILLMAN holds degrees in Architecture and Business as well as having been an astrologer for 22 years. DONNA SPENCER is an author and psychotherapist, trained by Milton Erickson and Gerhard Adler. Both are in private practice in St. Louis.

HEARKEN! YOU DO THE GODS OR THE GODS DO YOU This workshop takes “viable seeds culled from old husks” of both astrology and psychology to present a new synthesis for the helping professions. Astrology maps what the gods want - what the soul needs to learn and what purpose is to be fulfilled. With an understanding of one’s astrological blueprint for the soul, psychotherapy’s new task is to guide the individual in the creation of rituals to engage the world.

bel hooks a seeker on the path, a passionate writer and lover of ideas, is a cultural critic and feminist theorist. She is the author of more than 17 books, most recently all about love: new visions which examines contemporary thinking about the nature of love.

PARALLEL PERVERSIONS: PSYCHOTHERAPY AND BLACK EXPERIENCE Racist Eurocentric biases in psychotherapy structure the discourse and practice so that it appears antithetical to black experience. This talk will raise questions about the nature of this “resistance” among both african-american subjects and psychologists of all races, contrasting the notion of a “talking cure” with a vision of holistic mental health that prioritizes the union of theory and practice in everyday life.

T.J. KAPACINSKAS has been a Jungian Analyst in private practice for 28 years. He has studied Object Relations at the Washington, D.C. School of Psychiatry and at The International Institute of Object Relations where he is a Fellow.

JUNG, HILLMAN AND OBJECT RELATIONS AT THE CROSSROADS This talk will describe T. J. Kapacinskas’ work of the last twelve years to integrate Object Relations psychoanalysis into Jungian and Hillmanian thought and practice. His intent is to strengthen mutually their clinical usefulness, particularly with regard to transference and countertransference.

DANIEL KEMMIS Director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, is the author of Community and the Politics of Place and The Good City and the Good Life. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Kettering Foundation, a Fellow of the Dallas Institute, a member of the Advisory Board of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, and was appointed to the American Heritage Rivers Advisory Committee by President Clinton.

HEALING THE BODY POLITIC AS WORK FOR THE SOUL The understanding that the wholeness of the human being and the wholeness of the body politic are mutually dependent on one another is once again surfacing, fed by new streams of ecological, social and psychological awareness. At this frontier, there is a new form of politics emerging--more democratic and more dependent upon a collective wisdom than anything we now call democracy. It is, in its most promising form, soul work - a meeting and mutual refreshing of individual and world soul.

MARK KIDEL is a filmmaker and writer, working mainly in Britain and France. He has collaborated with James Hillman on a number of films including The Architecture of the Imagination; Kind of Blue; and The Heart Has Reasons. His most recent films are Les hopitaux meurent aussi, a feature-length reflection on medicine, death, loss and memory and the two films described below.

ANGELS AND DIRTY FACES Mark Kidel will show two of his recent films: Balthus the Painter, an intimate portrait of one of the centuries most mysterious artists and Naked and Famous, a portrait of the black musician, Tricky - the scion of a family of thieves and gangsters and a victim of asthma and eczema. Balthus describes the girls he paints as “angels.” One of Tricky’s recent albums was called “Angels with Dirty Faces.”

CINDY KLEINE is an award-winning film and video artist whose work has been exhibited at film festivals, world-wide. She has been on the filmmaking Faculty at Boston college, Hrvard, The Museum School, and The New School for Social Research.

TIL DEATH DO US PART Cindy Klein will show her film, “Til Death Do Us Part,” the sensation of the Telluride film Festival in 1998. This film, which activates people’s deepest feelings about marriage—psychologically, sociologically, and spiritually—will be the focus of discussion following the screening.

PAUL KUGLER is a Jungian analyst in East Aurora N.Y., and President of the largest Waldorf School in Western New York. The most recent of his many publications is Supervision: Jungian Perspectives on Clinical Supervision (Daimon Verlag, 1995).

LEGACY OF THE DEAD Jung’s personal life and clinical theory were haunted by “spirits of the dead.” His work could be described as an effort to honor the dead without succumbing to their overwhelming power. This lecture will trace the appearance of “revenants” in Jung’s life, beginning with his personal experience and early clinical observations, through his theoretical formulations and near death episode. Jung’s threshold experiences of the deaths of his wife and close friends near the end of his own life radically transformed his ideas on the role of the dead in psychic life.

HELENE LORENZ is Academic Dean of Pacifica and author of Living at the Edge of Chaos: Complex Systems in Culture and Psyche. MARY WATKINS is Coordinator of Community/Ecological Fieldwork and Research in Pacifica’s Depth Psychology program at Pacifica. She is the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests and co-author of Talking with Young Children about Adoption.

INDIVIDUATION AND LIBERATION: BETWEEN PSYCHE AND CULTURE What are the ways of imagining and working that Jungians/archetypal psychologists share with cultural workers? For instance, we can compare Hillman’s “seeing through” to Freire’s development of “critical consciousness,” Jung’s transcendent function to Homi Bhabba’s “third space”, imaginal work in therapy to arts in the community. This talk explores the interpenetration of intrapsychic and cultural work.

STANTON MARLAN is a Jungian Analyst and archetypal psychologist in Pittsburgh, PA, and adjunct faculty at Pacifica. His long-time scholarly interests include archetypal alchemical, psychology, Buddhism, phenomenology, post-modern theory and the psychology of dreams. He is the Editor of two books: Salt and the Alchemical Soul and Fire in the Stone: The Alchemy of Desire .

THE BLACK SUN: ARCHETYPAL IMAGE OF THE NON-SELF This lecture reflects on Sol Niger, or Black Sun, one of the most numinous images of alchemical psychology: that which dissimulates consciousness as an independently existing Self. It is an expression of the archetypal imagination as distinguished from humanistic imagination rooted in Western metaphysics. The black Sun breaks up the logical life of the soul. It refuses all reification, and in the light of its dark effulgence psychology stands at the threshold of the new millennium.

DANIEL MARTIN is the founder and director of International Communities for the Renewal of the Earth, a non-profit organization that fosters an ecological spirituality as the basis for a more creative and sustainable society. Dr. Martin spent many years in Kenya where he developed his concern for the environment and his conviction in the importance of skilled dialogue to effect change.

THE SPIRIT OF DIALOGUE This talk focuses on dialogue as the essential human capacity for our times. Thought creates the world and then denies it. Changing our world means changing our thinking and to do this we must change the way we think. Dialogue is a way of thinking together that allows us to participate in the unfolding of meaning.

ERICA HELM MEADE storyteller, poet and therapist, has been a teller of sacred tales in a variety of community and cultural venues for 25 years. She is the author of Tell It By Heart: Woman and the Healing Power of Story, which James Hillman has called “crisp, clear, startling, intelligent and fun.” For this symposium she will tell tales.

MICHAEL MEADE is a storyteller, drummer, and scholar of mythology and student of ritual in traditional cultures. He is founder of MOSAIC Multicultural Foundation, which brings together people from various ethnic, racial and class backgrounds. He is the author of Men and the Water of Life.

AT THE CROSSROADS: PERSONAL AND MYTHIC CHANGE Any moment can be a turning point, but some periods are momentous and bring all aspects of life and specters of death to the crossroads of awareness. The traditional and the unknown collide; the minds and hearts of the living are the ground of the conversation. This presentation will mix old stories with reports from the fields of culture to tune the conversation to that which is invisible but would be seen.

DAVID MILLER is a faculty member at Pacifica and the Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. His books include The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses and Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Play.

ANIMADVERSIONS ALL OVER AGAIN! EDUCATION, CULTURE AND THE POETICS OF IRONY This lecture reflects on the postmodern culture’s denial of principles as transcendent sources of order. If this denial makes the culture post-archetypal then that precisely is the archetypal nature of the culture. This ironic turn in the postmodern context raises a question about the nature of an education when there are no foundational principles to teach.

LESLIE NEALE a stage actress, currently teaches video production to eight high-risk juvenile offenders at Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. She uses the power of the camera to help these kids access their deepest feelings and wounds—wounds that have often led them to their violent behavior.

ROAD TO RETURN Leslie Neale will show her documentary, Road to Return, narrated by Tim Robbins, which she wrote, directed, and produced. The subject of the film is a successful aftercare program for ex-offenders returning to society.

DANIEL C. NOEL teaches at Vermont College and at Pacifica. He has published six books, most recently The Soul of Shamanism , as well as numerous articles on the psychology of religion and culture and on mythological studies.

AN APOCALYPSE OF BELIEF: MASS-MEDIATING ITS MILLENNIAL END An “epistemythology” of media-driven public credulity may help construct the millennial end of literalistic modern “belief.” Examples (The X-Files) suggest an “apocalypse of belief”: the collision between the need of post-Reformation piety to have its beliefs (pseudo-) scientifically confirmed and the Western calendar’s millennial deadline, pushing to the limit popular religion’s craving for what the APA calls “believed-in imaginings.”

SHARON OLDS currently the New York State Poet Laureate, teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. For fourteen years she has helped to run a writing workshop at a state hospital for the severely physically challenged. Her books of poetry include Blood, Tin, Straw, her sixth collection (Knopf, l999); The Wellspring; The Father; The Gold Cell; The Dead and the Living; and Satan Says.

GRAVE, CRADLE, BED: POEMS OF DEATH, BIRTH, LOVE, MOURNING AND LONGING Sharon Olds will read from her work.

RICHARD OLIVIER is a theater director who has recently directed Henry V and The Merchant of Venice at the Globe Theatre. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Cranfield School of Management and the Office for Public Management where he employs his unique form of art-based learning, Mythodrama, as a vehicle for top teams to work on vision, strategy and inspiration.

VISION, SERVICE AND INSPIRATION IN LEADERSHIP: A MYTHODRAMA WORKSHOP How can we bring our gold back from the underworld? How can we move from interiority to external engagement without losing integrity and authenticity? Richard Olivier will follow the path of Shakespeare’s Henry V as a myth of a great leader. Participants in his experiential workshop, Mythodrama, will have the opportunity to engage actively in the play and to relate it to their own lives. (No previous knowledge of Henry V is necessary.)

ENRIQUE PARDO is the director, with Linda Wise, of Pantheatre, Paris, and of the Myth and Theatre Festival (France / New Orleans / Ireland), which brings together the performing arts and mythological studies.

THE ARTISTIC THRESHOLD : A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTERPOINT A workshop presentation: part master-class, part documentary Recent performance titles seem to indicate that, like many artist-friends, I must be in a fractious mood: "Jason and Medea: Postmortem," "Shadow Boxing," "The Shakespeare Betrayal," "Hate, The Greatest Linguistic Teacher," "The Academy of Boredom," "Greed: The Bacchae Project," "On Scandal"... If a sentimentally academic shadow is on the rise, how to work on a counter-point?

GINETTE PARIS is an archetypal psychologist, a lecturer and the author of books on Greek and Roman mythology, including Pagan Meditations and Pagan Grace. She is a core faculty member and Research Coordinator for the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica.

HILLMAN-GIEGERICH: WHAT IS GOING ON? Now that the archetypal/Hillmanian perspective is firmly grounded and recognized as an important, original contribution, the time has come to welcome intelligent critiques. Unexamined theories lose their vitality or run the risk of becoming ideologies or cults. Giegerich, in his book, The Soul’s Logical Life, is attempting to do for the Jungians what Lacan did for the Freudians. His is a severe critique but an intelligent one. Ginette Paris will present the argument and open it for discussion.

ROBERT ROMANYSHYN, a faculty member at Pacifica, is the author of three books, all of which deal in one way or another with the culture of technology and the eclipse of the imaginal realms of soul. His most recent book isThe Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation.

THE ARCHETYPE AND THE QUANTUM The more deeply Jung probed the soul, the more he encountered the phenomenon of nature. The more deeply quantum physics has probed nature, the more it has encountered the phenomenon of soul. This lecture explores this synchronicity, showing how the quantum field of physics is the soul of nature and how the imaginal field of psyche is the quantum nature of soul. Together they recover the ontological reality of the mundus imaginalis, long known to mystics and poets.

THEODORE ROSZAK, is Professor of History at California State University, Hayward. An author twice nominated for the National Books Award, his works include: The Making of a Counter Culture, The Voice of the Earth , America the Wise: The Longevity Revolution and the True Wealth of Nations, and most recently, The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ECOLOGY OF WISDOM: REBELLIOUS WOMEN AND UPSTART ELDERS IN THE 21st CENTURY We’ve all heard the bad news: too much abuse of the ecosystem; too much spending, too much getting, too much greedy power. But there’s also some good news. Women and elders - the two groups most likely to help the Earth defend its precious cargo - are rapidly evolving toward power. This lecture considers the cultural and political prospects of how both these groups might transform our values in the coming century.

SHANTENA AUGUSTO SABBADINI worked on the foundations of quantum physics at the University of Milan and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is co-author, with Rudolf Ritsema, of the Italian Eranos I Ching.

IMAGINING THE REAL WORLD (from the point of view of quantum physics) Looking at the everyday world with quantum eyes turns all our habitual presuppositions around. Understanding what we usually consider most obvious - the existence of ‘things’ and of our own (relatively) solid bodies--becomes the greatest challenge. Reviewing the struggle of quantum physicists with this paradoxical challenge in recent years can stimulate new ways of imagining the world and our place in it.

ROBERT SARDELLO is co-founder of The School of Spiritual Psychology based in Greensboro, N. C. His main writings are Facing the World with Soul; Love and the Soul; and Freeing the Soul from Fear.

THE HEART OF ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY James Hillman broke through the suffocating confines of the therapy room and into the world with the publication of The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. This talk works with an alchemical, archetypal, spiritual and cultural imagination of the heart. The physically pathological heart is viewed as archetypal initiatory experience. Alchemical images of the heart show world as heart.

BENJAMIN SELLS, a former practicing lawyer, is a writer, psychotherapist and Co-founder and Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Imagination. He is the author of The Soul of Law and Order in the Court: Crafting a More Just World in Lawless Times.

A PSYCHOLOGY OF STYLE This presentation seeks to articulate an imagination of style necessary to read the world for its beauty and insights. As a psychological idea, style draws us into an aesthetic domain of living imagination where all things are perceived and understood as images and in terms of images. Style is an imaginative alternative to ideas such as identity and self. Style blurs, even distrusts, distinctions of outward and inward; the styles that shape the world are not separate from those that shape us.

SONU SHAMDASANI, is a historian of psychology and Research Fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London. He is the author of Cult Fictions: C.G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (Routledge).

PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND NEW FORMS OF LIFE Arising in the late 19th century, modern psychology and psychotherapy sought to revolutionize modern societies by providing the first scientific understanding of human life and the tools for its transformation. This talk traces what transpired and attempts to calibrate the effects that these disciplines have had in the 20th century.

DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY is a faculty member at Pacifica, a published poet and author of many publications on literature, culture and mythology. His most recent book is The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh.

NARCISSUS AND ECHO AT THE MILLENNIUM This presentation will examine Ovid’s powerful rendering of the myth of memory, Narcissus and Echo, as witness to two epochs facing one another in the virginal waters of reflection. It will consider what mythic energy lies within the images that allows the future to be retrieved and the past to be desired. One of the most important questions to come out of this reflection would be: How does the millennium conjure echoes from one mythic moment to another.

J. MARVIN SPIEGELMAN is a Jungian analyst in the Los Angeles area and an Adjunct Professor at Pacifica. He is author of 18 books in the fields of psychotherapy and the relationship between psychology and religion, including three works of fiction.

DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21st CENTURY: AN ARCHETYPAL FEMININE VIEW Beginning with the image of Aphrodite entering Freud’s consulting room and with Jung’s doctoral study of a spiritualist medium, the development of depth psychology can be seen as the incarnation and development of the archetypal feminine. Mid-century’s revolutionary feminism is reflected in the Papal Bull of the Assumptio Mariae and 2000 sees multiplicity, environmentalism, etc. bringing the psyche out of therapy itself. What portends?

SUZAN STILL is a painter, sculptor, poet and performing artist. As an instuctor of creative writing at a California men’s prison, she has brought her interest in depth psychology to bear both on prison reform and on the effects of creativity upon criminality.

ARCHETYPAL ACTIVISM IN PRISON This talk explores two branches of inquiry: How the theoretical, mythological and imaginal aspects of depth psychology have had a revitalizing effect on the lives of hardcore criminals; and how the present system of incarceration plays insidiously into the hands of our cultural shadows of bigotry and classism. The inmates will also have a voice on these issues through readings of their poetry.

RICHARD TARNAS is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and an adjunct faculty member at Pacifica. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern.

THE MYTH OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION “Some say that art is a complicated way of saying very simple things,” Cocteau said, “but we know that art is a simple way of saying very complex things.” Of nothing is this more true than myth. From the moment Freud first saw Oedipus in his dreams, depth psychology has sought to illuminate human experience by recognizing its deeper mythic forms, discovering its archetypal meanings. It is the year 2000--an apt time to take a long look back at the history of our civilization, especially its interior history, and seek to discern the most powerful mythic archai informing and impelling the biography of the Western soul.

BARBARA EARL THOMAS is a painter and writer. Her essays on the themes of family and their bonds in life and death have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. She is the author of Storm Watch.

THE ARTIST: INSIDE THE SKIN OF THE WORLD Painting is a way of telling. It’s a way to see what cannot be expressed in words of history, family, wars and our inexplicable intolerances. We can share through visual means the mythic terror of the experience and our sense of powerlessness to make change. This is a talk about the creative process employed to get inside the skin of the world to connect, communicate and engage.

GAIL THOMAS is co-founder and founding Director of The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and a consultant for the City of Dallas in which capacity she initiated the creation of Pegasus Plaza in the city center. Among her books are Pegasus, the Spirit of Cities and a work-in-progress on soul in the city.

VIOLENT FORMS IN THE CITY We are building more and more violent forms in our cities: gated housing, high-speed freeways, prison-like schools and hospitals, gadgets that blow out tires when we back up. The forms of the city shape the soul just as formal schooling shapes the mind. This talk argues for a new kind of city planning that considers the underlying forms at work in the making of the world. The city is the place to do our soul work.

ROBERT TRAMMELL is a poet, essayist, Director of the Dallas-based literary organization Wordspace and publisher of Barnburner Press. His books of poetry include Cicada; Epics; No Evidence; and George Washington Trammell.

PRISON WRITING: LANGUAGE AS A TOOL FOR SURVIVAL As more and more U.S. citizens are incarcerated in harsher and more de-humanizing conditions, more and better writing is emerging from prisons. In the ‘60’s, Robert Trammell spent a year in a Texas prison for the possession of marijuana and became a teacher of writing to young offend 0ers. This talk, focusing on his experience of prison life and writings, will be put in the context of recent and classic prison books.

TOM VERNER, psychologist, sleight of hand magician, and lover of poetry and dreams, has been doing dream work, teaching and performing for 30 years. For the last twenty years he has been director of the Transpersonal Psychology Program at Burlington College.

MAGIC WORDS Weaving together sleight of hand magic and poetry, some of the primary ideas and images in Archetypal Psychology will be illuminated.

LUIGI ZOIA is a Jungian analyst in Zurich and Milan and President of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. His articles and books have been translated into Italian, English, German, Portuguese and Greek.

AMBIVALENCE: OUR 20TH CENTURY TRAGEDY Bleuler expressed a central feature of the 20th century when he classified ambivalence among mental pathologies. Only pre-modern, tragic personalities are good and bad, cowardly and heroic. While popular entertainment still describes this “unreal” personality, deep down we are the tragic figures of modern ambivalence. We only pretend to be effective, to choose. This talk proposes that 20th century depth analysis was invented, not in order to fight this new disease but to preserve the possibility of a true narrative of our ambivalence.

CONNIE ZWEIG, co-author of Romancing the Shadow and Meeting the Shadow, is a therapist in West Los Angeles and adjunct faculty member of Pacifica. Her two forthcoming books, The Moth to the Flame (fiction) and The Holy Longing (nonfiction), examine the human longing for the archetypal realm.

THE SOUL IN EXILE: HOMESICKNESS AND HOMECOMING The motif of yearning for a long lost home recurs in the myths and art of every culture and beckons us to leave home to find Home. We witness homeless people carrying the specter of shadow; we have recurring dreams of homelessness, the soul in exile while the body rests. This talk contemplates the images of home, departure, wandering and return that lie hidden within us and fuel our yearning.

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