Noble Suffering:
The Archetype of the Tragic
3 Saturdays: February 13, March 12, April 9; and Sunday, May 8 12:00 noon �?4:00 pm
Instructor: Julie Bondanza, PhD
We Regret, Sold Out
This course examines closely the idea of the tragic and its place in art and mythology as well as in human lives. An understanding of the tragic helps us to see that for all the pain and misery that tragedy brings, there is also often a sense of triumph of the human spirit in the face of individual catastrophe. In the first class, we will read the classical Greeks: The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus, The Theban Plays by Sophocles and The Bacchae and Medea by Euripides. In the second class, we will read the three great tragedies of Shakespeare: Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. In the third class, we will read several European tragedians including The Wild Duck by Ibsen, Phaedra by Racine, The Father by Strindberg and something by an Irishman either O'Casey or James Stevens. Finally, we will read the work of four Americans: O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night, Miller's Death of a Salesman, Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and finally Williams' Streetcar Named Desire.
Note: This course is held at 104-106 Bedford Street, #1E in Greenwich Village.
Spring I: Classes begin the week of February 29th, 2016
Bhava-Chakra: The Wheel of Life
5 consecutive Mondays, 6:00–7:40 pm
Beginning February 29
Instructor:Gary Brown, LCSW, LP
One of the oldest historical images, The Wheel of Life, also called The Wheel of Becoming, is said to have been painted under the direction of the Buddha himself. A colorful mandala, it is an image of the Great Round in which we all find ourselves, six worlds circling the Three Poisons portrayed as a pig of ignorance, a cock of greed, and a snake of hatred. These are our daily and lifelong dimensions of humans, animals, hells, pretas, asuras, and devas in which we continually "re-incarnate."
In this course, we will travel through this image, exploring it through the lens of Analytical Psychology. We will discover how the Buddhadharma proposes we can get off this wheel and onto the Wheel of Being, a mandala of Three Blessings, understanding illumination, blissful satisfaction, and loving-kindness.
Although this course is may be considered a follow-on to the Fall 2015 course Five Buddha Families, it also stands alone.
Female Shamans: The Transforming Power of the Feminine
5 consecutive Wednesdays, 6.00–7:40 pm
Beginning March 2nd
Instructor: Maxson J. McDowell, PhD, LMSW, LP
.
We will interpret legends from Scotland, Siberia, Melanesia, and Palestine, each of which relates the adventure of a female shaman. (Follow the above link to see assigned reading, some of which you must do before the first class). A woman confronts a demon (perhaps a male hidden in the underworld), overcomes his destructive power, and thus brings fertility, or health, or wealth back to the community. These legends, and others like them, show that a hero slaying a dragon is only one way of developing consciousness: there are also heroines who develop consciousness. Some legends suggest that females began the work of consciousness and that the work was later taken over by males.
All of this is relevant to the psychology of women, and to men who are interested in their own feminine side. These stories help us both to understand the feminine and to see how feminine power supports intimate relationships. Both women and men can expect to gain insights into their own path towards healing and maturation.
The class should be fun, with plenty of student participation, and should be relevant to students at all levels of familiarity with Jungian psychology.
Please read each legend several days before that class. You will need several days to reflect on the images and wait for intuitions about their meaning. Symbolic thinking is slow: reading the legend just before the class won't allow time for reflection.
Dream Dialogues
5 consecutive Mondays, 6:30–8:10 pm
Beginning February 29
Instructor:Ilona Melker, LCSW
In our dreams, we often dialogue with dream figures in dreamscapes. These dialogues can continue even after we awaken, allowing us to explore the meaning of the dreamscapes as we continue to engage with our dreams. In this course, we will learn about the basic structure of dreams from a Jungian perspective and some of the various approaches to dream work within the Jungian analytical community. We will also practice dialoguing with and interpreting our dreams. This course is experiential and we will share dreams, so please bring a dream for the class.
Acts of Memory: Acts of Remembering
5 consecutive Wednesdays, 6:30–8.10 pm
Beginning March 2nd
Instructor:Sylvester Wojtkowski, PhD
We regret, this class is sold out
Soul: "I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly the cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory" Well of Mnemosyne: "Nay, drink of Me. The Well-spring flowing for ever on the Right, where the Cypress is." Inscription on Orphic tablets, in Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 573-4
"Memory not only records, it also confabulates, that is, it makes up imaginary happenings, wholly psychic events. Memory is a form imagination can borrow in order to make its personified images feel utterly real." James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 18
"By recognizing the imaginative inventiveness of memory, Freud rediscovered psychic reality. Instrumental to this rediscovery were psychic persons. Freud saw that though they did not have literal, factual reality, they presented the truth and validity of psychic reality." Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 18
We have not yet passed through the Age of Anxiety when we have entered the Age of Memory. From "What was the name of the movie that we saw last week?" to "Let's Google it": the fears of loss of memory and prosthetic ways to "restore" it, are familiar to us, of a certain age. Nowadays memory is not just an increasingly more fragile human faculty, of psychological or medical interest, but it is a vast industry. Culture seems preoccupied with it. On the one side: memory chips, and bigger hard drives, and websites that offer to store our 'digital lives' "forever;" on the other: social rituals of anniversaries, memorials and monuments. On the psychopathological side we can find: attention deficits, amnesia, traumatic memories, Alzheimer's, dementia.
In this course we will explore the phenomena of memory both on the collective and individual level and try to see through them to their symbolic underpinnings. In this effort we will be aided not only by the contemporary understanding of memory, Jung's own Memories, Dreams, Reflections, but also by the mythological stories of Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses.
Note: This course is held at 420 East 51st Street, Suite C.
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Spring II: Classes begin the week of April 11th, 2016.
Complexes: Their Introverted and Extraverted Side
5 consecutive Mondays, 7:00–8:40 pm
Beginning April 11th
Instructor:David Rottman, MA
Complexes interfere with what we want and need in love, in work and careers, in family life, and in relationships of all kinds. Jung says that they steal our very life from us — and yet he says that working on complexes is our path to wholeness and that every complex has a divine core. In this course, we will explore how complexes manifest in the outer world (in behavior), and in the inner world (in our feelings, emotions and attitudes). We will focus special attention on Jung's ideas of how people can "mitigate" the influence of complexes to achieve fulfillment.
Acts of Memory: Acts of Forgetting
5 consecutive Wednesdays, 6:30–8.10 pm
Beginning April 13
Instructor:Sylvester Wojtkowski, PhD
We regret, this class is sold out
"[Repression] is a kind of forgetting which is distinguished by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened even by a powerful external summons, as though some internal resistance were struggling against its revival."
Sigmund Freud: Delusions and Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva, 1907
"Gaps in [man's] childhood memories are merely the symptoms of a much greater loss, the loss of primitive psyche — the psyche that lived and functioned before it was reflected by consciousness."
C.G. Jung, Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1961, CW 18, p. 258
"There could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II, 1
Plato imagined that, before being born, souls drank from the spring of Lethe and forgot their knowledge of archetypes. Nietzsche praised forgetfulness for its contribution to happiness. Freud's notion of motivated forgetting, or repression, led to the rediscovery of psychic reality. Jung saw the loss of childhood memories as a symptom of a deeper loss--the loss of primitive psyche that inspired his quest for the recovery of the archetypal world. In our explorations of waters of Mnemosyne and Lesmosyne, we will focus on the contribution of forgetting to memory and imagination. We will travel through the landscapes of "lost memories" guided by two literary angels: Winfried Georg Sebald and Zbigniew Herbert. Sebald, a German writer, in Emigrants, Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz created a unique, evocative, atmospheric world of memory. His stories of wandering through Europe offer lyrical exploration of forgetting and remembering: "Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them." Herbert, a Polish poet, follows his Cartesian alter-ego, Mr. Cogito, on his solitary "almost metaphysical adventures" through the Mediterranean world and his reflections on the soul.
Note: This course is held at 420 East 51st Street, Suite C.
Beyond Words: Self-Discovery through Journaling in Images
5 consecutive Thursdays, 6:30–8:10 pm
Beginning April 14th
Instructor:Barbara Barry
Many individuals who strive for a greater self-knowledge keep journals. Most often these journals are recorded in the written language. However, Jung was particularly attuned to the place images play in the life of the psych telling us that "the psyche consists of essentially images .... full of meaning and purpose." He began his own amazing journal, The Red Book, with words but began adding images as well to deepen his exploration process. This class is instructive and experiential. Participants will learn techniques for eliciting images and learn how to give them visual expression using a simple painting approach in journal form. They will also learn ways to break through creative blocks and work in a spontaneous manner. No art experience or skill is necessary, only the desire to explore how a journal beyond words can enrich one's life.
Fee for materials: add $40 to tuition fee.
FACULTY
Barbara Barry is an artist and teacher in New York City. She is the creator of Art for Self-Discovery and her new book, Painting Your Way Out of a Corner: The Art of Getting Unstuck, [Class description]
Julie Bondanza, PhD, Julie Bondanza, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and Jungian analyst who trained at The C.G. Jung Institute of New York, where she was Director of Training, a job she also held with The Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. She is on the Board of the C.G. Jung Foundation and is in private practice in Takoma Park, Maryland, and lives in Washington, D.C. [Class description]
Gary Brown, LCSW, LP, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City. Currently, he is vice president of the New York Association for Analytical Psychology and a Supervising Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of New York. He is an ordained lay Buddhist priest and a designated Dharma Master.[Class description]
Maxson J. McDowell, PhD, LMSW, LP, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City. He is a board member and former President of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology.[Class description]
Ilona Melker, LCSW, is a Jungian psychoanalyst and Certified Sandplay Therapist. She is a training analyst and on the faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute. She maintains private practices in NYC and Princeton, NJ. .[Class description]
David Rottman, MA, is past President of the C.G. Jung Foundation. He is the author of the book The Career as a Path to The Soul. He is a longtime member of the Foundation f aculty and has a private practice in New York City.[Class description]
Sylvester Wojtkowski, PhD, is a Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City. He received his doctorate from the New School for Social Research.[Class description]