Connecticut Association for Jungian Psychology

A Lecture by Paul Morrisette, Friday, March 28, 2014, 7:30pm

Lecture Fee $15 ($8 Students)

Christ Episcopal Church, 11 Park Street, Guilford, CT.

Like all human suffering trauma appears capable of creative transformation or expression. It may also remain hidden and essentially unredeemed. Finding a way to recall, relate to, and integrate traumatic memories and affects is a goal and a real possibility in Jungian psychoanalysis.

Jung recognized trauma only grudgingly in my view. There were reasons for this such as wanting to set a different course than Freud, accepting essentially Freud's fantasy theory, and the belief that severe early trauma was rare. I also contend that Jung, like us all, avoided his own trauma with all his might, to the point where he may just have discovered his view of the psyche in order to avoid dealing with his own early affective pain. A cursory reading of Memories, Dreams, Reflections makes his early and severe trauma obvious, and it is most interesting that late in life he included all this (22 specific events) but never connects these experiences to his creative illness. However in creating the dialectic method, emphasizing the dissociative nature of the psyche, and exposing the nature and importance of symbolic life he gave us powerful tools for treating an all to common human suffering he rarely acknowledged.

Paul Morrisette has an undergraduate degree in psychology from Framingham State College and a Masters Degree in New Testament from Gorden Conwell Theological Seminary. He served as a Christian Minister before becoming interested in business. He owns Benick Machineworks, a sales and engineering firm. He is a candidate at the C.G. Jung Institute in Boston’s training program.

A Lecture by Penelope Tarasuk, Friday, March 21, 2014, 7:30pm

Lecture Fee $15 ($8 Students)

St. James Episcopal Church, 1018 Farmington Ave, West Hartford CT.

A talk about shadow: personal, collective, and archetypal. The dark side of the Self. This talk arose in response to a story which emerged nationally over months in 2012: Jeri Sandusky, pedophilia, sexual abuse, and Penn St. University and its coverup and obstruction of justice, and including the pedophilic exposure of within the Catholic Church. Transcripts of the Sandusky case led me to reflect and consider, “What is the message here? What complex is stirred within me, in the collective?” I delve into the issues of damage of relationship, violation of children, disruptions of trust in the community and their consequences both personally and collectively.

Penelope Tarasuk, Ph.D., I.A.A.P., has served on the C.G.Jung Institute-Boston Training Board, 2006-2011, where she is a faculty member, senior training analyst and supervisor. She has practiced for nearly forty years and maintains private practice in South Deerfield and Cambridge, MA. Her first book, Raft Of Dreams, has a NYC agent and she is working on her second book.

A Lecture by J. Gary Sparks, Friday, May 16, 2014, 7:30pm

Lecture Fee $15 ($8 Students)

St. James Episcopal Church, 1018 Farmington Ave, West Hartford CT.

This lecture will survey parallels in the work of C.G.Jung and British historian Arnold Toynbee. Both researchers explore the interrelationship between our personal psychological development and the contemporary crisis of history. Jung examines our emotional life and its relation to collective themes, while Toynbee investigates the resonance between the current cycle of history and our interior journey. Drinking from the same spring of insight, the two researchers see the stain of an individual's subjective ordeal as the source of personal and social renewal. Probing this symmetry in the reflections or Jung and Toynbee is the agenda for Friday's talk – with examples from the analytical practice.

A Workshop by J. Gary Sparks, Saturday, May 17, 2014, 9:30am-1:30pm

Workshop Fee: $75.  Advanced Registration Required

307c Brittany Farms Road, New Britain, CT. For directions phone 860-202-6314

Work Historian Arnold Toynbee recognizes that civilization uniformly traverses periods of genesis, growth, decline, and collapse. This workshop will explore his understanding of these historical cycles as well as his estimation of the West's place in its cycle of rise and fall. Each period, Toynbee feels, places different influences on the soul of its members, and each phase requires a creative psychological response from the individual if the society is to flourish. How do our personal lives and the life of the times touch each other? How does our place in history influence our dreams? How do our dreams react from our inner personality and at the same time to our place in history? What challenge is history now putting before us and what are we to give as our reply? The workshop will investigate these questions and their link to Jungian psychology from the perspective of both theory and practice

J. Gary Sparks holds a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute,Zurich, and has maintained an analytical practice in Indianapolis since 1983. He is the author of At the Heart of Matter and Valley of Diamonds, both published by Inner City Books. In his spare time he likes biking, trying to speak French, and cooking with lots of garlic. He has been a frequent presenter to the CAJP and always enjoys his visits in Connecticut.

A Seminar with James R. Scherer, 7 Saturdays, 9:30 - 12 noon,

March 29, April 5, 12, 19, 26, May 3, 10, 2014.

Seminar Fee: $250.

307c Brittany Farms Road, New Britain, CT. For directions phone 860-202-6314

This beautifully illustrated book contains an equally profound discussion of the demands made by the collective unconscious on a creative individual - the Swiss artist Peter Birkhäuser (1911-1976). Through unfailing dedication to his dreams, active imagination, and painting the images which resulted from these efforts, Birkhäuser’s images became “a mirror making visible what is hidden in us and our age.” (p. 11). Through the depth of her insights and her careful choice of words, Eva Wertenschlag-Birkhäuser (a Jungian analyst and the artist’s daughter) has written one of the finest psychological discussions in the last fifty years of an individual’s encounter with the creative spirit and divine will which live within the human psyche.

Required text: Eva Wertenschlag-Birkhäuser, Windows on Eternity, Daimon Verlag, 2009.

James R. Scherer is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich. He is a member of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association of Analytical Psychology. He lives with his wife in Hartford where he has had an analytical practice for 27 years. During these years, he serves as a CAJP Board Member and Program Director. Furthermore, he regularly offers Saturday seminar classes and occasional Friday evening lectures.

A Lecture by Teresa Arendell, Friday, May 2, 2014, 7:30PM

Lecture Fee $15 ($8 Students)

Christ Episcopal Church, 11 Park Street, Guilford, CT.

“This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.” (Jung 1963:359)

Today’s far-reaching ecological crisis is one of consciousness. Yet, even as we despair, we know that Psyche is dynamic and emergent, never static. In the changing human story, Psyche and Nature come together again, after a long and uneasy separation. The evolving myth pulls threads from the primordial levels of the unconscious – the spirits of the land and the ancestral soul. We come again to find the world enchanted and to love the Earth. In this talk, I delve into Jung’s writings on the Nature and Psyche relationship; Jung was deeply concerned about our diminished connection with and loss of awe for the natural world long before the environmental movement gained momentum. I elaborate on Jung’s proposed resolution of the disconnection of Nature and Psyche, and draw on contemporary ecopsychologies informed by Jungian thought. The members of the audience and I then explore a traditional Wabanaki myth and consider its symbolic depiction of a balanced relationship between Nature and Psyche. We contemplate the “feeling of the kinship with all things” (Jung) in our modern context.

Teresa Arendell, Ph.D.,is a Jungian Analyst practicing in Yarmouth, Maine. She’s a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute, Boston. She’s active in both the Maine Jung Center and the Boston Jung Institute. She’s lectured and offered workshops both at the Jung Center and other Jungian organizations. For thirty years she’s taught sociology at the college and university levels, most recently for nearly two decades at Colby College in Maine. She’s passionate about her work and the natural world. Her current writing project is a manuscript titled Jung, Nature, Psyche – and the Wild.