THE 2025-26 LECTURE PROGRAMME

Cost (including refreshments): £15 online and in the room; low-waged/unwaged attendees can pay £10 on the door, or buy a full-price ticket online and be reimbursed on the door. (We cannot reimburse you online). If you would like to attend but cannot afford it, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Tickets can be bought on Eventbrite until 9.30am 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.

Wednesday 3rd September 2025

Patrick Harpur in Conversation: a special online-only event 7.30- 9.15pm

In Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, and The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination, Patrick Harpur explores realities that underlie and transcend the purely material.  This is the realm where folklore, imagination, mythology, and anomalous phenomena converge to reveal a broader understanding of existence. Harpur challenges scientific orthodoxy by insisting that imagination is not just subjective fantasy—it participates in reality itself. He draws on thinkers from Plato and Plotinus through Blake, Coleridge, Yeats, Jung, and Hillman to argue that the Imagination, with a capital I, is the faculty that mediates these daimonic worlds.

In an age dominated by reductionist materialism and hyper-rationalism, Harpur’s message is radical yet deeply ancient: reclaim the lost dimension of wonder, mystery, and meaning. By doing so, we reintegrate the sacred into life, connect to a deeper sense of purpose, and restore our relationship with the unseen dimensions of nature and psyche.

Harpur’s novel, Mercurius, is also deeply philosophical, blending mysticism, alchemy, and Jungian psychology to offer a unique perspective on the intersection between spirituality and everyday life. Harpur suggests that the world of Mercurius is not a world of clear boundaries and certainties, but one that thrives on ambiguity, fluidity, and transformation.

Patrick Harpur grew up in Surrey, attended Cranleigh School and travelled for a year in Africa before going to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, to read English. Subsequently he did much of the reading and research which he would eventually use in his books, and wrote poetry, stories and plays by way of practice, while supporting himself with part-time jobs.

Books by Patrick Harpur include:
Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, (Penguin Viking 1995)
‘Witty... disturbing... beautifully and intelligently observed’ -The Sunday Times.
‘A brave, thought-provoking book... Hats off to Harpur... Thank heaven there are people like him to rejuvenate our vanishing sense of wonder’-The Daily Mail.

The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Penguin 2002, Squeeze Press 2009) 
‘Sublime’- The Guardian, ‘Casual brilliance’- The Independent. 

Mercurius; or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth, (Macmillan, 1990; 2008 Squeeze Press)
‘The most explicit account of the alchemical art ever published’- The Literary Review. 
‘Fascinating... absorbing... the kind of book I deeply enjoy,’- Colin Wilson, author of The Occult, Mysteries, The Outsider.

October 11th 2025

Chris Bucklow

They Call it Art Afterwards

I tend to think of my paintings as data, rather than as art. Like dreams, they provide information about the psyche. It’s only later that they get called ‘art’.

This talk will be about my use of daydreaming, or Active Imagination, to produce images. I start each canvas without a plan, and the painting becomes a story that grows in the telling. After many years of working in this way, patterns and themes emerge, such as the recovery of a primordial, non-verbal language; a language of things rather than words. As in dreams, internal entities are personified as characters, places and objects.

I have recorded my dreams since 1986. The whole sequence of 688 dreams were published in the book ‘Nantucket Sleighride’ in 2017, along with an interpretive essay exploring the major themes. I will talk about how the nightdreams and the daydreamed paintings speak of similar things, and appear to have the same teleological aim, but that each uses a different lexicon of symbolic objects.

Chris Bucklow started to make art when he was thirty-two, after a significant dream. Prior to that he was an art historian and curator at the V&A Museum in London, where he specialised in Romantic Period prints and drawings, including William Blake. Bucklow’s artworks can be seen in many museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, all located in New York. Chris’s long conversations about his paintings with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in 2003 were published in the book ‘If This Be Not I’ (British Museum, 2004). Copies will be available at the talk.

Chris has also written several books exploring the underlying metaphorical languages of artists including Philip Guston (Wordsworth Trust, 2007) and Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 2019). He has been awarded residences at The Banff Centre, Alberta; The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere and the British Museum, London.

November 8th 2025

Alan Chapman

How to do what Carl Jung did (without murdering what you claim to speak on behalf of)

Where did Carl Jung’s psychology come from and how did he discover it? How can we walk the same path as Jung without turning the process into a parody - or worse, killing the very thing we seek to participate in? In this talk Alan Chapman will describe how his own personal story of Western esoteric practice and spiritual experience - and especially where it led him - came to reveal itself as the same tradition behind Carl Jung’s psychology. Along with the startling hidden truth running behind the esoteric cultural transformation of the 20th Century.

Alan Chapman is a Western esoteric teacher who guides students through the process of awakening. He is the author of Advanced Magick for Beginners and Magia, and co-author of The Baptist’s Head Compendium with his long-time collaborator Duncan Barford. The two wizards have a current podcast series called Passport Through Hades, which is an ongoing magical and social commentary informed by their current editorial work on the Collected Magical Works of Aleister Crowley. You can watch a summary of Alan's ground breaking research on Crowley that was presented at the Oxford Thelemic Symposium last year, and enjoy the free library of video and audio recordings of Alan’s teaching material, over at www.barbarouswords.com.

December 13th 2025

Corinne Harragin

In the Waters of Story: An oral storytelling session with guided reflection

In this session, Corinne will share chosen stories about rivers, springs and waterways, taking us into the rich world of our individual and collective imaginations. Through guided reflections, we will follow the flow of the different stories, exploring the different images that story offers us about our relationship with nature, imagination and soul.

In the process we might consider Amitov Ghosh’s assertion that ‘the environmental crisis is also a crisis of imagination’.

Corinne Harragin has been touring around the UK telling stories for the last ten years. Using physicality and humour she reanimates the written-down-ness of story with her own brand of oral performance. Corinne also runs storytelling workshops to help us find our storytelling voices. Her recent show Troubled Waters tells the stories of sacred rivers and springs. As a research associate at the University of Bristol, her current project Storying the Avon (funded by the Brigstow Institute) explores connection to water through storytelling. She also designs and delivers storytelling and presentation skills training for the universities of Bristol and Gloucestershire. She has recently completed an MA at The University of Bristol in which she researched contemporary forms of oral storytelling.

Troubled Waters Web Page and Trailer  https://www.corinneharragin.co.uk/troubled-waters

Storying the Avon Webpage - https://www.bristol.ac.uk/brigstow/research/projects/20242025/storying-the-avon-from-freshwater-science-to-folklore.html

Corinne’s Website - https://www.corinneharragin.co.uk

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/corinneharraginstorytelling/

January 10th 2026

Roderick Main

Synchronicity and the foundations of our epistemology

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) developed his concept of synchronicity to address the scientific, spiritual, and social crises he saw as stemming from the one-sided rationalism and materialism of modern Western culture and its concomitant disenchantment. With the concept of synchronicity, he provided a holistic approach to knowledge that aimed to undo disenchantment by reinstating mystery, meaning, and connection to the sacred at the heart of our scientific and scholarly as well as therapeutic and creative practices. In this presentation, I shall first clarify the holistic character of Jung’s proposed epistemological contribution with his concept of synchronicity. I shall then show how this epistemology is underpinned by a dual-aspect monist and panentheistic ontology, which grounds knowledge in the sacred. Finally, I shall suggest that, with this grounding, the epistemology naturally gives rise to a re-enchanting hermeneutic methodology capable of attending equally to the homely and the high-weird.

Roderick Main, PhD, works at the University of Essex, UK, where he is a professor in the department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth Studies. His books include The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (Brunner-Routledge, 2004), Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (SUNY, 2007), and, most recently, Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment: Mystery, Meaning, and Metaphysics in the Work of C.G. Jung (Chiron Publications, 2022).

31st January 2026

Mark and Susan Kidel with James Hillman

Two Films: The Architecture of the Imagination: The Door and The Staircase

1. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Door (1994)

This is poetics of the doorway – with detours through thresholds, hinges, locks and keys. A designer bolts herself up in a ground-floor London apartment that becomes a kind of prison. A heavily-built doorman incarnates the image of Janus as he stands guard outside a Piccadilly nightclub and looks right and left, two-faced like the Roman God. The guide to the Masonic Hall in London speaks of the way in which aspiring members of the Society knock on a massive brass door in order to be admitted. Others evoke the essential nature of the edge between “in“ and “out”, the sacred and the profane, the comfort of home and the dangers of the outside world. Hillman concludes by commenting on a world in which the doorway has given way to open-plan, and our need for secrecy, intimacy and containment is ignored, with a price - a loss of soul. With quotations from classics by Hitchcock, David Lean, Murnau’s “Nosferatu” and Cocteau’s “La belle et la bête”.

2. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Staircase (1994)

The staircase can evoke ascent and descent in life, whether it’s Jacob’s Ladder reaching up to Paradise or the stage on which a beautiful lady can make a graceful entrance - an image of Aphrodite descending from Heaven. It’s also a place of drama, chases, bone-shattering falls or encounters with Fate. The film follows Shell’s CEO as he climbs up over twenty floors to his office overlooking London, a daily test of his fitness as man and executive. The architect Eva Jiřičná describes a transparent steel and glass stairway she designed for a Chelsea clothes shop. Including clips from “The Fallen Idol” and a Chaplin slapstick classic, moments of suspense as Peter Lorre is chased down the stairs in a Fritz Lang film noir and a class in which young ladies are taught deportment and the correct way to negotiate the stairway of a country house, the film brings to life a multi-faceted image of life’s journey, seen as a matter of reaching for glorious heights or being catapulted down to failure, as in the classic game of Snakes and Ladders.

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

February 14th 2026

Dwight Turner

Dreams of the Racial Construct

When Martin Buber challenged Carl Jung on his supposed avoidance of the outer world, his retort, that ‘the shadow is the other,’ clearly acknowledged the importance of our relationships with friends, family, and those we do not like. Yet, it was Marie Louise von Franz who explored the role of projection in her wonderful book ‘Projection and Recollection,’ citing that whole groups can project their individual and collective shadows onto other groups and thereby act quite violently as we destroy that self-created other.

Dreamwork, which is a cornerstone of Jungian Psychotherapy, is a core means of understanding the internalised objects which we may have projected out onto the racialised other. This workshop, which offers a presentation based around the racial construct, together with an exploration of race in dreams explores how we might as activists be led by the wisdom of our inner unconscious as we try to bring sanity to an often-insane world.

Dr Dwight Turner is Course Leader on the Humanistic Psychotherapy Course at the University of Brighton, and a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice. Dr Turner is the author of Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy: Depoliticised pathways towards intersectional practice (2025), The Psychology of Supremacy (2023), and Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2021). All are published by Routledge.

An Intersectional Psychotherapist, Dr Turner is an experienced conference speaker. He can be contacted via his website www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk or on social media on LinkedIn, Threads, or on BlueSky at @dturner300.

28th February 2026x

Mark and Susan Kidel with James Hillman

Two Films: The Architecture of the Imagination: The Window and The Tower

1. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Window (1994)

Focusing on a recurring trope in cinema - itself a framed opening on the world - James Hillman’s exploration of windows is as rich as the rest of the series in film clips, from an obsessive sexually-motivated voyeur in Patrice Leconte’s “Monsieur Hire”, one of many films to play with the window as way of sampling the lives of others, with a measure of anonymity, to Miss Havisham’s heavily draped window in David Lean’s “Great Expectations”, and the moment that Pip finally draws the musty curtains open to expose the elderly woman to the light. In paintings of the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit, beamed down to Mary by a celestial dove, travels through windows. The figure of a woman at the window, a favourite of painters, evokes both interiority and a longing for contact with the magic of the external world. Ghosts and vampires, as in “Nosferatu” appear at windows and we use curtains or shutters to keep them out. The late artist Charlotte Johnson (mother of Boris) talks of her voyeuristic tendencies, and the erotic chase that peering at others from window to window can facilitate. As frame for reality, a vehicle for penetrating light, and a fulcrum for the imagination, the window is rich in archetypal associations.

2. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Tower (1994)

In a film that darkly anticipates 9/11, with a final sequence, introduced by the Tarot image of The Tower being destroyed by celestial lightning, and followed by a series of high-rise buildings being blown up, this episode describes the hubris that comes with over-reaching for Heaven, seeking the protection of a super-sized building, cut off from the earth. A surprising cast of characters includes a lonely man who dwells in a tower that rises up above Southall’s Asian-dominated streets, a New York writer who senses the total isolation and unreal lives of those who dwell around her high up in skyscrapers; and a scholar, expert on the Virgin Mary - often imagined as an impregnable fortress - visits a 16th century tower near Ipswich in which a nobleman locked up his daughter so she could learn the seven arts away from the distractions of the world. The skyscraper in King Vidor’s film of super-élitist philosopher Ayn Rand’s classic novel “The Fountainhead” offers an image of over-reaching ego – once again the excessive promotion of the individual at the expense of the collective, begging to be destroyed, as was the Tower of Babel, and the towering buildings in Fritz Lang’s dystopian and vision of authoritarianism, “Metropolis”.

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

March 14th 2026

Adam Curtis

Holding gentle space for gender

In this space we will come together to consider ways to hold ground for gender expressions that sit outside of the current dominant binary framework. As a starting point for discussion I will offer examples from my personal life and my work as a GSRD therapist (adopting the approach of the newly emerging Gender, Sexuality and Relationship diversity modality). The aim here will be to explore how we can strive to work relationally and creatively in the current UK landscape, where trans and non-binary lives have been dehumanised by reductive structural and political interference. We will consider this position from historical and global perspectives, in order to gain a broader view of how the binary system provides just one way of looking at our relationships to biology; other ways are not only fictional possibilities, they already functionally exist in other times and places. How can we find the courage and honesty to uncover and examine the roots of our own biases that may block our gentleness towards this innate and precious facet of human experience? What is after all a part of life with much to offer the collective and just as worthy of respect and understanding as any other relationship to self.

Adam Curtis (he/him) was assigned female at birth and identifies as trans masculine (non-binary) within the current framework of understanding. His working life began as a PE and English teacher; a career he was forced out of under section 28 in the 1990’s. He then spent 20 years as an operational Firefighter with Cornwall Fire and Rescue service, undertaking initial training to become a Person-Centred therapist alongside this work. He has ten years of experience of working with participants and regularly guest lectures at Cornwall Counselling Institute. He is now a senior accredited GSDR therapist.

28th March 2026

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

April 11th 2026

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.

May 9th 2026

Kevin Lu

A Haunting Inheritance: racial hybridity and the family unconscious in Saga

Kevin Lu, PhD, is Professor of Applied Psychoanalysis and Head of Department (Practice) at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK. His research mobilises analytical psychology as a lens applied to an interdisciplinary exploration of cultural phenomena and societal processes. Two of his papers – on racial hybridity (2019) and archetypal thematic analysis (the latter co-authored with Ann Yeoman and published in 2023) – have been awarded the Scholarship Award for best article published in the IJJS. His co-authored book, (also with Ann Yeoman), Jung’s Collected Works: The Basics, was nominated for the 2024 Gradiva Award for Best Book.

June 13th 2026

Mark Nemglan

Initiatory landscapes as maps of personal transmutation

There is clear commonality between the organisation and alignment of ancient and indigenous places, and ritual, shamanic and mythic landscapes. But why do these geographies typically consist of an island incorporating a central place or axis mundi in the form of a primordial world-tree or grove, a cosmic hill or mountain, or temple, accompanied by life-giving rivers emerging as springs, flowing in specific directions?

Why are so many oriented to, and aligned with, the cardinal and intercardinal directions? And what role do celestial bodies, and the various deities assigned to specific directions, perform?

And lastly, what is their relationship to the initiatory trials of the archaic mystery religions of classical Greece and Rome, the rites of Egyptian kings, and the doctrine of metempsychosis, central to so many cultures and belief-systems?

This talk will explore these topics in depth, and apply their principles to an existing, real-world example in the form of the Glastonbury landscape which, once understood, reveals itself as a place of initiation in which personal transmutation and renewal can occur.

Mark Nemglan is an author, writer, researcher and esotericist, with an ongoing theoretical and practical interest in myth and mythopoesis, the British Mystery Tradition, and esoteric history. His book Avalon Working was published by Scarlet Imprint in 2024. He is currently researching the role of emerging mythologies as lived belief systems in an age of conspiracy and global collapse.