Doubtless

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.