My sense of the utter enmeshment in and
captivity to the Boomer worldview by the supposedly psychologically enlightened, evidenced here by a program offered by Jungians. I know these four people: passionate liberal Obama-loving Democrats all. Drowning in what Jungians refer to contemptuously as "the collective."
One of the opiners, a man I quite like but who is entirely wrapped in a liberal Democrat world, once astonished me by going all Chris Matthews' style gooey about
Obama's smile...
His
description of the cultural complex reveals the assumptions involved, which will vitiate the project. I detect no interest at all in trying to self-analyze the cultural complexes and unexaminable assumptions of the Jungian collective, reflecting so closely the view of the Bay Area bourgeoisie.
At least in one place, he admits the difficulty they will have in "resisting the typical Jungian temptation to reduce every group conflict to an archetypal motif." In my experience, this has been
an automatic hermeneutic of accusing one side (easy to guess which) of shadow projection and then lamenting the loss or the patriarchal repression of the feminine. End of story.
WORKSHOP
OPEN TO CLINICIANS & THE GENERAL PUBLIC
THE CITIZEN’S DILEMMAS IN DIVISIVE TIMES |
FOUR VOICES
MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS
Those of us who get our bearings from the “Spirit of the Depths” as well
as the “Spirit of the Times”—who pay attention to politics as well as to
our dreams—find this a difficult historical moment. How do we manage
ourselves psychologically and politically amidst all the fury and vitriol in
public discourse? How do we tend both psyche and polis? The American
election looms against the backdrop of a fierce zeitgeist—economic and
environmental crises, revolution, tyrants who murder their own citizens,
occasional glimpses of a new day.
During this half day conference four Jungians will speak to these
issues from diverse points of view. In the tradition of Jung’s Man and His
Symbols, we will use word and image to evoke both the collective and the
archetypal.
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 2012: SURFING THE EMOTIONS
AND COMPLEXES OF THE COLLECTIVE PSYCHE
Super PAC dollars and the insatiable national appetite for the lowest
level of pandering at the highest volume make the chances of a
substantive debate about our country’s vision and policies of the future
highly unlikely in the 2012 Presidential elections. Although so much is
at stake, it is still reasonable to ask: why should anyone join the “talking
heads” who will be surfing the subject endlessly? Even though the
issues and policies will be muddied rather than clarified, there is still
something inherently fascinating about this national spectacle which
will play more like a Superbowl game than the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The fascination comes from the fact that the collective psyche and its
connection to the cultural and collective unconscious are energized with
charged emotionality, complexes, and characters parading across the
national stage. The elections give us a unique opportunity to consider
the state of our national psyche in its confusions, absurdities and deep
concerns. What issues will trigger potent emotions in the electorate?
Which cultural complexes with their stereotypical thinking and fixed
attitudes will shape and determine public opinion? The Presidential
elections are a collective x-ray about how we perceive ourselves as
a people, what we fear and what we hope for at a conscious and
unconscious level.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CACOPHONY:
AN INTROVERT’S GUIDE TO POLITICAL EXTREMISM
In the journey of many seers comes the confrontation with a politics of
extremism. Jung’s reaction to the break with Freud threw him into the
chaos of a collective unconscious at the brink of war. His explorations in
The Red Book attest to the depth of the conflict and reveal his discovery of
an inner guide. From the Middle East, we learn of the persecutions of great Islamic
mystics and their revelations of light and guidance. Henry Corbin,
the renowned French Islamist, writes of the Great Disjunction in the
Western psyche and how it functions in the cultural wars between the
Christian West and Islam. With this perspective in mind, we will examine
some of the religious and political forces within our own society.
CLINGING TO THE AXIS MUNDI:THE MUSE OF POLITICS
How can poetry respond to the rancor, the bitterness, the extremism, the
climate change deniers, the New Deal dismantlers, the Women’s Rights
plunderers of our collective moment?
(Bolding mine). Poetry is no more than the flap
of a butterfly’s wings, the dart of a hummingbird—a strophe flung into
the roar of the mob. Poetry does so little, dares so much. Poetry is the
prophet down from the mountain, a gadfly on the body politic, a witness
to the desecration; poetry sings our cultural myths, mourns what’s been
lost, praises the newborn day. NRL will read and muse
about some of her political poems.
COSMOS, PSYCHE, AND POLIS:
AN ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON OUR TIME
The past and the future are converging in our time with extraordinary
force. Old structures are collapsing, movements for radical change
spreading, societies becoming deeply polarized – all this amidst an
increasingly critical state of Earth’s biosphere. To help us navigate such a
dramatic threshold of transformation, we need multiple perspectives and
sources of insight.
Jung pursued astrological research throughout his career, and many of us
who have followed his lead in a more systematic way have concluded that
there are few frames of reference more helpful in illuminating the timing
of individual and collective archetypal dynamics than an archetypally
informed knowledge of the ongoing planetary movements. Perhaps more
than any other form of analysis, archetypal astrology can illuminate
synchronistic waves of events and trends occurring throughout the world
at a given time, while also revealing larger historical patterns that unfold
cyclically through the centuries. In this final portion of the conference,
we will examine the current planetary alignments to help identify the
major dynamics at work in the cultural zeitgeist for our complex and
precarious moment in history.
