bridge icon C.G. Jung Public Lectures, Bristol

C.G. Jung Public Lectures,
Bristol

Next Film - Mar

28th March 2026 10.30 am - 12.45 pm

Mark and Susan Kidel with James Hillman

Film: Kind of Blue – An Essay on Melancholia and Depression (1994)

(Royal Television Society Award – Best Education Film, 1995)

Named after a late 1950s’ Miles Davis jazz album, Kind of Blue is a deeply stirring and poetic film-essay defending the notion that feeling ‘blue’ isn’t to be avoided at all costs, but embraced, as the Ancients did, acknowledging that going ‘down’ offers a potential pathway to wisdom and wholeness, an experience of life in which darkness and suffering have as much of a place as well-being and light. An experience of life in which the god Saturn and his archetypal slowness offer a contrast to the fast pace that we frantically seek in an attempt to avoid the complex richness of the soul. We must, James Hillman argues, accept the downward pull of dark feelings and thoughts, recognising the ephemeral and the inevitability of change and decay. There can be transient beauty in melancholy as well; the “beauty”, as one contributor puts it, quoting Keats “that must die”.

A film rich in evocative imagery – empty beaches at low tide, gloomy graveyards, lonely woodland ponds, withered flowers, derelict houses with broken windows, shuttered shops in abandoned streets, the desolation of urban crowds - and melancholy sounds that range from Bartok to Ray Charles, and Beethoven to John Coltrane. There are paintings by Dürer, Giorgione, Cranach, Picasso, Munch and others, all of them conjuring the melancholy mood. Contributions from writers Jenny Diski and Trevor Preston, mythographer Jules Cashford, the Irish uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn and others, are structured around an inspiring and provocative interview with James Hillman.

At: The Cube [off top-left of King Square], Dove Street South, Kingsdown Bristol BS2 8JD and Online, Saturday 10.30am-12.45pm

ONLINE TICKET BOOKING

INHALL TICKET BOOKING

Next Lecture - April

April 11th 202610.30 am - 12.45 pm

Jay Barlow

The Umbilical

Traditional psychoanalytic approaches view excessive parental, social or relational involvement in human development as an opportunity for linking complex gender and identity experiences. The analyst’s unconscious bias might present an opportunity for interpretation that could resemble something akin to conversion therapy. All of which leaves the patient feeling alienated and confirming their exiled Self. Early relational trauma affects every gender and sexual identity. Each traumatic situation, from inappropriate interference to traumatic abuse, affects how an individual forms and experiences relationships. Gender and sexual identity are fluid agencies of the Self within all human development. For people who are non-normative when it comes to gender, identity or sexuality, evidence of early relational trauma should not unthinkingly be treated alongside mental health struggles. This clinical paper explores once weekly analytic work with a young, exiled transman who lived in a dysregulated state of mind from his early relational trauma. It uses Louise Bourgeois’s images to explore the early development of projective identification and proposes that this becomes a way of exiling unwanted feelings into the other with hopes of finding a place of belonging – as if through a psychic umbilical.

Jay Barlow is a Jungian Psychoanalyst member and Director of Training of the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP), London. As a Training and Supervising Analyst, he supervises and teaches on various analytic trainings in the UK and in IAAP developing groups in Europe, Eastern Europe and China. He is interested in an analytic approach to Human Development, how Infant Observation informs the development of an Analytic Attitude, Early States of Mind, and Unconscious Fantasy in the consulting room. He was recipient of the 2022 BPC Diversity in Training excellence award, and received the 2025 Michal Fordham Journal of Analytical Psychology Prize for his paper The Umbilical. He has an MA in Jungian and Post Jungian Studies and has worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the NHS in an acute unit for Borderline, Narcissistic and Affective Personality Disorders. Jay is in full time private practice in South London.

General information

Since the early eighties, the C.G. Jung Public Lectures have played an important part in establishing and maintaining Bristol's reputation as an acknowledged centre of interest in Depth Psychology.

The monthly lectures are on current issues and topics broadly related to the field of analytical psychology and are given by a variety of professional and established speakers. They are open to everybody with an interest in depth psychology, the therapies, philosophy, religion, mythology, life and the arts.

The aim is to provide a friendly, informal space for Jung's ideas and philosophy to reach a wider public. There is time for refreshment, socialising, and networking after the lecture followed by participative discussion with the speaker in the round.

 


A reduced-price bookstall is sometimes provided by Bookmark, Bristol. Their website includes a good selection
of Jungian and Analytical Psychology titles (also at reduced prices)!
Tel: (0117) 9672928  www.psychologicaltherapybooks.co.uk

 

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