Breaking the Spell of the Myth of Late Modernity:
Mentalization, Alchemical Imagination, and Individuation

Saturday, March 21, 2026
10:00 am – 3:00 pm, ET
A Zoom Seminar led by John Michael Hayes, PhD, ABPP

Contact hours: 4 CE contact hours for Licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists for this program.

Jung was prescient in seeing the ominous consequences of psychological and spiritual poverty of late modernity, those soul destroying consequences we are living at this critical moment. Every epoch has its dominant myth, the narrative that defines identity and priorities for a good life; in effect that myth casts a spell that creates the reality we live. In his recent prophetic book Paul Kingsnorth calls our myth, this spell of late modernity, “the machine”: unfeeling, relentless, de-humanizing.

Can psychoanalysis and analytic psychology wake us up, break this spell, and help rescue our diminishing humanity from the ashes of this cultural wasteland? Perhaps.

In this workshop, we will look at how two complimentary approaches to making meaning and expanding consciousness that just might help save us from ourselves, two approaches that in very different ways ultimately leading to individuation. In recent decades contemporary psychoanalysis has made an ontological turn, shifting its focus to how meaning is created from the raw material of experience, a process named mentalization. Jung appropriated the metaphors of alchemy to describe the subtle processes of psychic wholeness, growth of consciousness, and deep relationality. With the development of mentalization and alchemical imagination, we can perhaps find a way forward.

Learning Objectives:
Participants will:
1. Identify aspects of the unexamined myth of modernity that undermine human flourishing and contribute to our current societal crises.
2. Accurately describe the critical role of contemporary psychoanalysis and analytic psychology in challenging modernity’s mythical assumptions.
3. Describe how failures in mentalization result in the scapegoating and violence that characterize too much of our current political culture.
4. Identify Jung’s vision of alchemical imagination as both complimenting the ontological turn of contemporary psychoanalysis and opening greater possibilities for expanded consciousness in the creation of psychological and spiritual meaning.

John Michael Hayes, Ph.D., ABPP, graduate from the Catholic University of America. He has had a long career as a psychologist and psychoanalyst in the Baltimore-Washington area. Currently he is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine; faculty and training and supervising analyst, Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute; and faculty and dean of candidates, Jungian Psychoanalytic Association. He holds degrees in theology and is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. He has taught pastoral psychology and spirituality at the Ecumenical Institute, St. Mary’s Seminary and University, and at the graduate programs in pastoral counseling Loyola University Maryland. He maintains a private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Baltimore.