7.5 CE contact hours for licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists.

We don’t know where dreams come from but, from experience, we know their purpose. They show us the next possible step in our developing consciousness. They warn us if we are going astray, encourage us if we need it and offer penetrating insights into our confusion. To interpret dreams we have to be disciplined and logical but also emotional, feeling, imaginative and sensate. Using Jung’s concepts as our guide, we will combine our insights to explore each dream and feel success when the class as a whole recognizes an answer and experiences a deepening of consciousness. We will not work with class members’ dreams. Please bring a dream, with permission, from a family member or friend.

Please look at the suggested readings at this address in advance of the start of this class: www.jungny.com/jungian-dream-interpretation-readings

7.5 CE contact hours for licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists.

In traditional astrology, the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter every 20 years is referred to as the Great Conjunction or the King Maker. After approximately 200 years of conjunctions in earth signs, their ‘mutation’ conjunction in December of 2020 in the air sign, Aquarius, marked a new era. The ‘ruler’ or highest value of collective consciousness is shifting from material consolidation and security (earth) to new ideas and systems of communication (air).

The class will explore these two archetypes, looking at astronomical history, astrology, and the father/son Kronos and Zeus in Greek mythology, to understand how these energies can be experienced both collectively and individually. We will use the Medieval notion of correspondia as a lens to understand symbolic perception of the phenomena of planetary movement and its relationship to Jung’s idea of the archetypal field and Hillman’s notion, “archetypal seeing through” the levels of inner and outer experience. We will consider how Saturn in Aquarius in Jung’s natal chart corresponds to his psychology, to his work, and to its relevance to this time. We will also draw connections to this configuration in the charts of other individuals.

Taking an archetypal, psychological approach to astrology, the class is intended to broaden our understanding of Jung’s archetypal theory and increase our capacity for symbolic thinking. We will cover fundamental meanings of the astrological symbols as needed, but if you have no knowledge of astrology, I recommend Clare Martin’s Mapping the Psyche: An Introduction to Psychological Astrology, Volumes 1 and 2.

7.5 CE contact hours for licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists.

Jung famously said that a person should not try to haul in a fish that’s larger than his boat.

Exactly how do we strengthen and enlarge the capacity of our ego-consciousness (our “boat”) to deal with powerful negative emotions such as discouragement and anxiety, and powerful positive emotions such as inspiration and love?

In this course we will discuss how Jung’s discoveries about the human psyche can help us in our experience of our inner world, and also how a strengthened consciousness helps us to relate to others at work, in the family, and in close relationships. We will also explore Jung’s ideas about how we deal with changes in the outer environment.

While Jung is most often identified with concepts such as the archetypes of the collective unconscious, he said his focus with his patients was on helping to them to relate to the realities of their daily living—through the individual process of augmenting conscious awareness. We will focus both on how strengthening and enlarging consciousness involves differentiating and separating from factors that interfere with living creatively, and how integrating and assimilating new ideas and attitudes builds up the lived experience of “what it means to be me.”

Readings will consist of weekly handouts of quotations from Jung’s work and the work of his pupil Marie-Louse Von Franz.

Supplementary Texts:
The Way of the Image, Yoram Kaufmann
The Symbolic Quest, Edward C. Whitmont

7.5 CE contact hours for licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists.

Join us in a five-week Dream Art workshop and sculpt, draw, paint, dance, write, or compose music from the depths of psyche.  Jungian analyst and two-time Gradiva Award winner Maria Taveras will conduct this workshop using the Zoom platform.  Participants will translate an image from one of their own dreams or spontaneous images in any expressive form they feel conveys the intrinsic meaning of the image and learn the creative process that C.G. Jung calls “active imagination.”  Taveras will guide participants with psyche’s expressions individually. This intimate experience will be a unique opportunity to become acquainted with the hidden knowledge that is possessed by the unconscious as sources of creativity that broadens and deepens their relationship with their inner life.

Maria Taveras describes the Dream Art process in her own art as a sculptor in this way:
My approach is drawn exclusively from my dreams and active imagination.  My attention is focused on rendering the dream image in its likeness as it begins to develop in manifold ways while noting the emotions, voices, visions, moods, and gestures of the dream image that come up spontaneously or in an evolving mental picture of it. This gradually leads to a visual and verbal dialogue that takes place throughout the creative process, in the studio or not, while sculpting the dream image. This visual and verbal dialogue is a constant reverie of questions and reflections, in conversation with the image.  The sculpture is, as it were, a “living symbol.”

This creative process opens the imagination and the heart to experience the channeling of divergent currents pulsing through the emotions. The challenge is psychic in nature – as the content that is being worked out progresses toward the final, formal manifestation of its essential destiny.  The creative process slowly begins to bring into consciousness the experience of it as it metamorphoses in a deep and powerful way.  At this point, it is difficult to know “who” or “what” is leading me or the sculpture, for the creative process takes on a life of its own. The visual and verbal dialogue is continuous all through the process. When the sculpted image is completed and externalized, my relationship to it shifts. The image is now a formal sculptural form endowed with the experiences of feeling my way through the image. The dream image has become a part of me consciously, and I begin to relate to it as a profoundly vital aspect of my own personality. I understand my sculpted dream images to be the pantheon of my psyche.