Sylvia Brinton Perera, M.A., L.P. We are living in a time of heightened border awareness as old securities of containment and simple divisions are forced open by new challenges. Walls don’t work well in the world of internet and drones, nuclear, biological, and informational contaminations, shifting climates, and vast populations of seeking refugees. In this fluid, open environment, beyond binary separations, we need attunement to the rich plurality of life on earth and the different levels of consciousness operative in…

Guilford Dudley, Ph.D. and Monika Wikman, Ph.D. As we continue to pass scientific thresholds of no return, two major psychological issues are emerging. One is our proclivity for self-deception and avoidance — dissociation from a reality staring us in the face like the barrel of a shotgun. Those who do look away from the shotgun as though it were not there can be appreciated with great compassion, since the reality can simply be too much to bear. The other issue…

Pamela Power, Ph.D. Jung wrote that visionary art provides a compensatory function to the time in which it is produced.  If we can recognize what art expresses, we can be more deeply aware of the culture in which we live. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the evolution of Western music and describe the spirit that has propelled it since the early church.  We then turn to the ‘music’ of Rap culture that today plays a powerful, and…

STEVEN HERRMANN, Ph.D., MFT and LORI GOLDRICH, Ph.D. Jung described active imagination as a technique for discovering the mythopoetic images hidden in the emotions. Jung modeled this method in his Red Book. A related technique is what Walt Whitman called Vocalism. Poets who have used this method have helped to articulate what our national myth is in the United States. One of our central myths is “Spiritual Democracy.” Spiritual Democracy is a way to sacred action, whether through political activism,…

Donald Kalsched, Ph.D. When Bruno Bettelheim published The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales in 1989, controversies erupted about how all the violence in the Grimm’s tales might traumatize our children or provoke them to violent behavior. Bettelheim said this was nonsense—that violence was part of life and that children were actually helped by having imagery for violence that placed it in the context of the human imagination and surrounded it with meaningful stories. Today, the…

Zoom Online Lecture: Finding Hope in Troubled Times: the Longing for Rebirth in an American Cultural Complex KAITRYN WERTZ, L.P.C. This presentation first considers the early American experience of rebirth in a new land and its accompanying mythology of violence, conquest and scapegoating. This is contrasted with an emerging theme of rebirth through relatedness, visible in recent children’s films and in the dreams of individuals. The image of the frontiersman, the European colonists’ earliest hero, contrasts with that of a…

Zoom Online Panel and Public Forum: Our Country in Crisis Each November for the past few years, the panelists - Jacqueline, Jerome, and Don - have presented their current reflections about the state of our nation, followed by a group discussion. Given the ongoing intensification of radical and rapid shifts in our nation with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and national demonstrations supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, it is once again impossible, until November arrives, to closely identify…