C.G. JUNG PUBLIC LECTURES 2023-24
Friends Meeting House
126 Hampton Rd,
Redland, Bristol BS6 6JE
There is lift access.
10.30am - 12.45pm
SPEAKERS FOR THE 2023/24 LECTURE PROGRAMME
Cost: £15 online, £12 in the room, £8 low waged (booked on Eventbrite or paid at the door): if you buy a full-price ticket on Eventbrite, you will be reimbursed in cash at the door. Sorry, there is no reimbursement if you don’t come in person. After a life online, it would be lovely to resume meeting in the room together, so we are encouraging everyone to attend in person if they can. Living costs are high at the moment; if you want to attend but cannot afford the price, contact Isabel or Stephen.
Tickets can be bought on Eventbrite until 9.30 am on the morning of the lecture. You will need to buy a ticket if you want to watch a recording of the lecture at a later date. Most of the talks this year will be blended: simultaneously in-house and online. We will email out the Zoom link for the lecture and full instructions on how to join.
Attendance entitles people to 2½ hrs CPD
NOTE: Lectures are usually on the second Saturday of the month. However, the first lecture of the year will be on Saturday, October 21st 2023.
Lectures 2023-24
October 21 2023
Deep Positivity: re-reading Jung’s Self
Birgit Heuer
This talk introduces deep positivity as a view of the world that is both novel and necessary. It is new because it is based on leading-edge quantum and complexity theories. It is also necessary for healing. This is one of the most important things I have learned in 43 years of clinical practice. Importantly, it is also borne out by neuroscience. Quantum theory boggles the mind because it entails higher conceptual complexity. We enter a world no longer made up of opposites, light, and shadow, because they have been transcended, yet are retained at the same time.
Jung’s archetypes, though, entail stark opposites for they have both a benevolent and a destructive face. I will explain how this is problematic from a psychotherapeutic point of view and why we need a completely benign trope, such as deep positivity, for healing. Thus Jung’s central archetype, the Self, in particular needs updating. The Self is our intrinsic connection with the Divine and if this conflates good and evil, we can never be safe enough to heal. I will explain how addressing this heralds a post-post-Jungian era.
Dr Birgit Heuer is a Jungian Analyst of the BJAA. She served on the BJAA training committee and worked as a clinical supervisor at Kingston University. She teaches on Jungian-analytic trainings, as well as at Birkbeck College. She has lectured internationally and published numerous papers and book chapters. Her PhD is on Sanatology, a Clinical Paradigm of Health and Healing.
November 11 2023
No Man is an Island: the world in your consulting room in a time of climate breakdown
Judith Anderson
In this presentation, Judith explores the ways in which an alarmingly changing climate impinges on our work, from the direct impact of temperature change on the body/mind, the traumatic effects of climate-related disasters, and the many varieties of eco-distress. How can we find a path between apocalyptic thinking and 'business as usual’? What skills have therapists to offer to a situation of collective trauma that challenges our ideas of individual transformation? What do Jungians in particular bring to the situation?
Dr Judith Anderson has a background in psychiatry and trained as a Jungian Analytical Psychotherapist with the West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy in the 1990s. She has a longstanding interest in how social issues and psychotherapy interact, chairing Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility for some years. Hearing Jungian Mary-Jayne Rust speak in 2005 on climate change led to this becoming a focus. She became part of the founding group of Climate Psychology Alliance and has been Chair of its Board of Directors since 2020. She is passionate about the need for psychotherapists to become ‘climate-aware’.
December 9 2023
Was Jung Woke? Exploring Systemic Supremacy Through Dreamwork
Dwight Turner
Although often criticised for some of his more sexist or racist views, the work of Carl Jung has a good deal to say about the world that we live in and how it shapes us. Recognising that we are as much formed by systems of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism, Jung understood that these externalised structures very much mould who we are from a very early age, creating aspects of the Shadow which need to be explored in any process of Individuation.
This morning's lecture will therefore look at just how supremacy sits within the psyche and the ways in which the internalised oppressor may hinder or silence us as we go about our day-to-day or week-to-week lives. It will also look at how in a process of individuation, only by facing that which has become internalised from said systems of supremacy can we then even attempt to divest ourselves of said structures in order to walk that long, lonely path towards individuation.
Dr Dwight Turner is a Course Leader on the Humanistic Counselling and Psychotherapy Course at the University of Brighton, a PhD Supervisor at their Doctoral College, a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice. His latest book Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy was released in February 2021 and is published by Routledge. An activist, writer and public speaker on issues of race, difference and intersectionality in counselling and psychotherapy, Dr Turner can be contacted via his website www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk and can be followed on Twitter at @dturner300.
January 13 2024
‘Turn and Face the Strange’: A Jungian Perspective on the words and music of David Bowie
Matthew Appleton
“I suspect that dreams have far more use for us than we’ve made of them. I’m quite Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active potent force in our lives…” David Bowie
David Bowie used words, music and theatre to ignite the imagination of generations of young people and remained an ongoing creative force in the lives of many people who had discovered his music in their youth. The title of this talk ‘turn and face the strange’ comes from his song ‘Changes’. The capacity to change by playing with fluid personas marked Bowie’s personal individuation process and inspired others to explore different facets of the psyche. Nowhere in popular culture does the dialogue between ‘the spirit of the times’ and ‘the spirit of the depths’ play out so powerfully, as in the development of Bowie’s work. Here we encounter ‘otherness’ as shadow aspects of ourselves, we experience ‘anima’ and ‘animus’ in a dynamic inner dance, we pass through liminal and imaginal dreamscapes that refuse to be defined and connect into the collective unconscious of a culture in crisis.
Matthew Appleton MA UCKP RCST is a psychotherapist with more than 20 years experience of international lecturing, facilitating workshops and training practitioners. He is the author of the book Transitions to Wholeness. Integrating Prenatal, Transpersonal and Somatic Psychology (2020). Living in Bristol, he is a lifelong Bowie fan.
February 10 2024
‘The Strategic Survival Personality': a developmental trauma response associated with within Boarding School Syndrome.
Nick Duffell
The client with attachment problems will be familiar to all therapists, but the sophistication of the ex-boarder’s survival self and the widespread devastation it brings to individuals and families, over generations, is another story.
Despite frequent references in English literature to the agonies experienced at boarding schools, the long-term psychological effects of boarding remain unnoticed. Such education carries high social status but leads to unacknowledged, deeply-buried damaging consequences.
Ex-boarders are amongst the most difficult clients, and even experienced psychotherapists may unwittingly struggle to address the needs and tactics of this client group. This introductory morning will offer pointers to understanding this high-functioning if brittle, socially-rewarded persona that masks secret internalised shame.
Nick Duffell is a psychotherapist, psychohistorian and author whose pioneering work on the psychology of boarding has been featured on film, TV and radio. He has run therapeutic workshops for ‘Boarding School Survivors’ since 1990, participated on a virtual-reality attachment repair research project at UCL and currently provides specialist training for therapists to work with ex-boarders. His books include The Simpol Solution: A New Way to Think about Solving the World’s Biggest Problems, Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System, and Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy.
March 9 2024
Green Man, Dark Earth: Faces of an Archetype
Paul Venables
The Green Man is a carved male head, surrounded by or disgorging leaves. His image embodies the beautiful and the sinister, and can be seen as both a life and death force: he offers the possibility of a reconnection with our intuitive sense of nature. Despite his primordial roots, this figure continues to regenerate and has recently resurfaced as a contemporary image that challenges our attitude to identity and our place in the world. Coming at a time of crisis - when attitudes to our natural environment are seriously challenged – this talk will examine the positive and negative aspects of growth and how we might engage with this re-emerging image of the Green Man as a symbol to mediate and counterbalance our attitude towards nature, both inner and outer.
Paul Venables is a Jungian Analyst with the Guild of Analytical Psychologists. He previously trained as an Integrative Psychotherapist at the Minster Centre in London, and then as a supervisor at the Metanoia Institute. He has practiced both privately and in the public sector for twenty years. Originally an actor, he worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in the West End, appearing regularly in television and film for over twenty years.
Eventbrite attendance ticket booking
April 13 2024
Psychic Spring Clean
Stephen Pritchard
What is the relationship between imagination, ritual, dream, spectacle and performance? In writing about the experience of Active Imagination Jung chose the image of the theatre. We can either witness it as a spectacle, or we may feel that ‘The piece that is being played does not want merely to be watched impartially, it wants to compel participation. If we understand that our own drama is being performed on this inner stage, we cannot remain indifferent to the plot and its denouement…Although, to a certain extent, we look on from outside, impartially, we are also an acting and suffering figure in the drama of the psyche’ (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: 1955-6). Artaud, the visionary French theatre practitioner, set out to create a drama that would be a form of ‘soul therapy’.
We invite you to participate in a series of enjoyable group activities which offer the possibility of insight and transformation. Come and play.
Stephen Pritchard has lectured and run workshops for Jungian groups in Bristol and London. He is a committee member and sometime host for the Jung Lectures Bristol. Stephen studied English at Oxford and is Secretary of the Blake Society. After co-founding the WOMAD Festival with Peter Gabriel and friends, Stephen worked in the performing arts (music, dance, theatre). As a theatre practitioner he specialises in psychophysical work through teaching and performance. Stephen has produced a series of drama films for education. He has been a Drama Consultant, visiting practitioner and guest Director, running workshops in schools, universities, businesses and organisations both in the UK and abroad.
May 11 2024
From Two Souls to One World: Individuation and the interactive field
Mark Saban
Jung’s experience as a child of having ‘two personalities’ impacted the development of analytical psychology in numerous ways. But its most important influence was upon the emergence of Jung’s notion of individuation. Individuation, the central notion of analytical psychology, is all about the avoidance of one-sidedness. Through the operation of the ‘transcendent function,’ Jung saw individuation as a way to transform creatively in the direction of wholeness.
In his later psychology in particular, Jung became particularly interested in utilising these ideas to overcome the dominant Cartesian split within modern consciousness, and specifically the dichotomy between the psychological dimensions of interiority and exteriority.
My goal in this seminar is to explore the notion of the extended psyche that Jung developed in the light of these questions. I will explore how individuation shows up within the analytic vessel and particularly through the energetic field which gets constellated there. I will go on to explore the ways in which these ideas can also provide a way to approach the psychosocial, potentially enabling us to make an authentically Jungian contribution to political and social questions./p>
Mark Saban PhD trained with the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists, with whom he is a senior analyst, working in London and Oxford. He is also a lecturer in Jungian and post-Jungian studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.
Publications: Mark co-edited (with Emilija Kiehl and Andrew Samuels) Analysis and Activism - Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Psychology (Routledge 2016) and wrote Two Souls Alas: Jung’s Two Personalities and the Making of Analytical Psychology (Chiron 2019) which won the International Association of Jungian Studies’ Best Book of 2019. Recent papers include ‘Two Jungs: Two Sciences?’ International Journal of Jungian Studies(2022) 1–21.
June 8 2024
Gender Dysphoria, Individuation and the Shadow
Robert Withers
Today’s talk will be taken from Bob’s chapter of the same name, in the book Jung’s Shadow Concept edited by Christopher Perry and Rupert Tower (Routledge 2023). Bob outlines how parts of the psyche that are unacceptable to the ego can be split off into the shadow, where they are encapsulated and projected into the body. This approach integrates Winnicott’s work on mind body dissociation with Jung’s work on individuation. Bob contends that formulating certain cases of gender dysphoria in this way, opens up the possibility of working with them psychotherapeutically, without the need for potentially harmful hormones and surgery.
Robert Withers has published a series of book chapters and articles on transgender issues since working with someone who regretted their medical transition in the early 1990’s. He has had a life-long interest in the mind body relationship and worked as a complementary therapist for several years before training at the Society of Analytical Psychology, where he is now a training analyst and lecturer. He has published articles on the mind body relationship, the cross over between complementary medicine and psychoanalysis and on the placebo effect. He has lectured internationally on all these topics and is a former senior lecturer with the University of Westminster and the inter-university college Graz. In 1990 he co-founded the Rock Clinic - a community based psychotherapy and counselling service in Brighton, where he still works.
You can follow him on Twitter @BobWithers52