Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced the death of God by human hands: “we have killed Him.” Yet C.G. Jung, who in many ways stood upon the philosopher’s shoulders, considered the study and engagement of world religions to be indispensable in the psychotherapeutic treatment of individuals, especially in the second half of life. We can ask, along with Jung: Is there religion when there is no living god, or is it rather that “God” is not dead and instead something in us has died?

A master of finding common ground in the major spiritual traditions of the world, Jung would interpret religious rituals and scripture into a psychologically oriented language suitable for contemporary readers to learn from and wrestle with regarding our image(s) of God. Through Jung and contemporary cultural critics, we will engage what may be one of the most important concerns of our time: the interconnectedness of mental health and what can be called a religious, or spiritual, attitude. The intention of this presentation is to broaden our horizons regarding the religious and spiritual background of some of the general theoretical principles--and practical applications--of Jung’s Analytical Psychology.

 The presentation will be augmented by audio-visual aids prepared by the instructor.

C.G. Jung was in constant pursuit for a religious function in the psyche and for understanding the intersection of spirituality and science. His childhood metaphysical experiences coupled with the conflict between a Christian and Spiritualistic Religious home environment intensified his search for understanding and meaning.  Jung leaned on his family events, history, medical and mythological education as a doorway into the creation of his Theory of Analytic Psychology.

This seminar will discuss the elements that contributed to Jung’s quest for a religious function in the psyche such as Spiritualism, his descent into the psyche after his break with Freud and his ongoing mythic life with the dead.  These elements ultimately contributed to the inception of Jungian Analytic Psychology.

C.G. Jung wrote that every religious creed is originally based both upon the experience of the numinosum and upon trust or loyalty, faith and confidence in a certain experience of a numinous nature and the change of consciousness that ensues. (CW 11, para. 9)

Both Jung and Francis of Assisi experienced the numinosum and had a shift in consciousness, but both explored the experiences differently.  Jung searched for understanding the numinous through scientific and medical means while Francis of Assisi pursued the investigation through mystical engagement with the divine and identification with the poor. Both however came to a similar conclusion: that all things were interconnected.

Francis of Assisi is familiar for his love of animals, embrace of the poor and founding of the Franciscan community. These archetypal themes have been projected into our consciousness and embraced by our society.  Among his accomplishments is the first known example of poetry in modern vernacular Italian, the Canticle of the Creatures, or more popularly the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

This seminar will focus on the deeply radical life and thought of “Il Poverello,” the Little Poor Man of Assisi, as well as on the mystical themes of the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. We will explore his mystical engagement with the divine which resulted in his approach to spirituality.

Learning Objectives

1. 1. To engage the text of the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon and discuss the Canticle in relation to the interconnectedness of all things.
   2. To discuss the mystical engagement with the divine and the spirituality of Francis of Assisi.
   3. To explain and experience the unspoken worship of just being (“this-ness”).
   4. To discuss the relation of suffering and the knowledge of mortality within the numinous experiences of Francis of Assisi.

In his seminal work The Great Mother, Erich Neumann demonstrates that the primordial images of the mother are deeply set in the human psyche. He gives examples from the earliest cultures: images, rituals, myths and stories. He shows how these images appear in modern psyches: in dreams, poetry, novels, religions and in everyday tributes to our mothers. Mother imagoes can be found in monsters, geological and celestial formations as well as in animals, insects and birds. Neumann recognizes how the archetype manifests in both its nurturing and terrifying forms. He describes both the elemental and transformative aspects of this archetype.

C.G. Jung in Volume 9 of The Collected Works devotes an entire essay to the mother complex. He considered the mother archetype the most significant of all, for this is the archetype of which we first become conscious. It contains all the nurturing, abandoning, terrifying and awesome aspects of the mother. It is at the heart of our most primitive complexes; in fact, it is at the heart of how we see ourselves.

In this seminar, we will explore the archetype of the mother in her many aspects and its effects on our psyches. Worship of the goddess as mother can be found throughout history and in myriad cultures . The mother archetype is at the heart of many, if not all, spiritual experiences as well as at the center of our personal psychology. We will examine this archetype though art, poetry, myth, fairy tales, dreams, fantasies and personal experience.

Learning Objectives

1. 1. To explore the archetype of the Mother in her many aspects.
   2. To describe the effects of the Mother archetype on our psyches.
   3. To give examples of the Mother archetype across various cultures.
   4. To relate the Mother archetype to primitive complexes.

C.G. Jung, with his sense of two personalities that lived within him, one fully oriented to the inhabited world of his everyday life and the other deeply aware of the great Mystery that lay beyond the ordinary world, committed his life in the search of how these two personalities were related to each other and in what forms they lived within in the world.  As a citizen of the Modern World,  Jung lived his life as a Modern Man, fully engaged with the Present Age, and creatively transcending the reach of the past with its structures of tradition, faith, belief  and the sense of the  Eternal Return of the Same by which pre-modern men and women lived their lives in antiquity.

In the course of becoming a Modern Man, Jung became aware that, in doing so, he had lost something of great value, which he called the loss of his soul.  When the numinosity of this sense of his own estrangement from his depths grasped Jung, he undertook an inner journey to find his soul and thus to be restored to the Mystery of his own inner Depths.  As that journey unfolded,  Jung deconstructed and reconstructed the meaning of religion in human life and, as an empirical psychologist, created a model of the psyche by which a new form of spirituality became possible.

This seminar will explore this story of Jung’s psychospiritual journey and the understanding of the spiritual dimension of life that emerged from it and its relevance for our post-modern age and the meaning of our own spiritual lives.

Learning Objectives

1. 1. To outline the Jungian model of the psyche.
   2. To explain the psyche’s implications for not only our psychological development but our spiritual development as well.
   3. To discuss Jung’s psychology of religion and his psychology of psychic individuated wholeness and their possible relationship to each other.
   4. To describe the reality of the numinosum in human experience and the symbolic forms in which that numinosity is expressed