ABOUT THE C.G. JUNG FOUNDATION

Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario

ISSN 1918-6142

Chiron is a newsletter that exists to support the work of the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario. It was established in 1980, and has existed in electronic form since 2006. Its name and masthead image, adopted at that time, are drawn from ancient Greek culture. In Greek mythology, Chiron was the last centaur, a son of the titan Cronus. He was famed for his wisdom, knowledge and skill at deciphering the will of the gods, to healing effect.

Chiron

Volume 30, No. 1 Autumn 2010

Editor: Robert Black

NEW! .pdf version of this issue for easier printing

 

Contents

The C. G. Jung Foundation of Ontario
and the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts
invite you to

A PARTY HONOURING DARYL SHARP

at Hart House, University of Toronto, Debates Room
from 3 to 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, December 12, 2010

 

Jungians are a pretty intuitive bunch, and a group of us has intuited that it’s high time to honour our friend with a big party. The realization came later that it’s also the 30th anniversary of Inner City Books! 

Daryl returned to Toronto from Zürich in 1978 and started a thriving analytic practice, co-founded OAJA with Fraser Boa and Marion Woodman in 1979, and established his highly successful publishing house in 1980. Inner City Books has to date sold over a million copies of books by Jungian analysts! 

Daryl has been a gracious and forthright friend, mentor, analyst and support to countless people, often giving, yet seldom in the spotlight. 

One of the planned group gifts is, yes, a book!  We invite you to share your reminiscences and anecdotes of our esteemed colleague, possibly illustrated with photos and perhaps even your cartoons or artwork (b/w).  Contributions of any kind to this project will be much appreciated, even if you are unable to attend on December 12.  Please send material to Caroline Duetz at duetz@interlog.com or 35 Courcelette Road, Toronto, ON  M1N 2S9 (416-469-2423) by November 8. (Financial contributions for the Book Project or other gifts will also be gladly received at the office; details below.)

The cost of  $20.00 per person will cover the food and gifts, and there will be a cash bar. 

Please RSVP with payment before November 30, to Catherine Johnson at the office of the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario at 416-961-9767 or . If paying by credit card and you need to talk with a person, please call on a Thursday during office hours. You can also send a cheque to the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario, 223 St. Clair Ave West, Third Floor, Toronto, ON M4V 1R3. 

We hope you will join us in honouring Daryl on December 12! 

Andrew Benedetto, Caroline Duetz and Jean Connon Unda are Jungian analysts in private practice here in Toronto.

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MONTREAL 18th I.A.A.P. CONGRESS REPORT

The XVIIIth Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (I.A.A.P.) took place in Montreal last August. The theme of the Congress was “Facing Multiplicity: Psyche, Nature, Culture.”

Seven hundred Jungian Analysts from around the globe came to debate the results of their most recent scholarship and practice. Plenary sessions included presentations on such topics as archetypes in the light of neuroscience, genetics, and cultural theory; emotion as the essential force in nature, psyche, and culture; and the alchemy of attachment: trauma, fragmentation, and transformation in the analytic relationship.

Break-out sessions further explored some of the “wondering questions which may hold and contain” (Margaret Wilkinson) that were shared during conference discourse. The audience thoroughly enjoyed a performance of a dramatization of the Jung-White letters. Participants also enjoyed a seminar on the Red Book and a workshop on movement as active imagination. Cultural events included a concert by composer Marie Bernard and the Montreal Sound Wave Ensemble featuring a new musical instrument called the Martenot Sound Waves, whose vibrating sound waves are meant to reach deeply within. There was a cocktail and visit to an art gallery in Old Montreal featuring the works of Quebec painter Corno and a viewing followed by discussion of “La Derniere Fugue / The Last Escape” facilitated by  filmmaker, Lea Pool. Spring and Chiron publishers hosted a book launch.

The I.A.A.P. is the accreditation authority for Jungian Analysts world wide. The triennial Congress provides a unique forum to conduct Association business and consult with the membership as a whole. At the Delegates Meeting, Canadian analyst and Conference Chair, Tom Kelly, was elected to the position of President-Elect with a resounding majority. This means that he will succeed the current President, Joe Cambray, at the next Congress to be held in three years in Copenhagen. This was the first time the Association has met in Canada, and Tom Kelly will be its first Canadian president.

This report is given by conference attendee Rosemary Murray-Lachapelle, a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Ottawa-Gatineau

RED BOOK SYMPOSIUMRed Book Library of Congress

Stacey Jenkins, Jane Smith-Eivemark, and Cliona Dickie at the “Red Book Symposium,” Library of Congress, Washington D.C., June 19,2010.

Three candidates in the OAJA Analyst Training Program hit the road in the early hours of June 18, 2010, driving to Washington to attend the Red Book Symposium at the Library of Congress. It was a wonderful opportunity to see the work of C.G. Jung recognized and honoured, and his Red Book welcomed into the Library of Congress collection.

Highlights of the Symposium were presentations by Sonu Shamdasani (“Liber Novus: Jung’s descent into Hell”), James Hillman (“Jung and the Profoundly Personal”), and Ann Ulanov (“Encountering Jung being Encountered”). The atmosphere was intense, although both James Hillman and Sonu Shamdesani managed to share humour in their presentations, lightening the atmosphere of the deeply personal and awe inspiring contents of C.G. Jung's Red Book.

Copies of the Red Book are available for consultation in the Fraser Boa Library, open Thursdays at the office of the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario.

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C.G. JUNG’S BOOKPLATE

Jung notes in his autobiographical reflections that, among many other examples, he painted on the ceiling of his Bollingen tower the coat-of-arms that his grandfather altered from an older design. But he did much more than his: he engaged the artistic services of Swiss artist Claude Jeanneret 1886-1979, a great creator of medieval-style woodcut prints early in the 20th century, to make for him the beautiful representation that graces every book in his library.

C.G. Jung Bookplate

In egalitarian Switzerland, there has been a long tradition of “burgher arms.” These are heraldic devices indistinguishable from those of countries with monarchs, with the big difference that they are taken up, changed, or dropped at will, instead of being granted as hereditary honours.

Jung’s grandfather, also named Carl Gustav Jung, changed the family arms from a phoenix – an allusion to renewal or youth – to reflect his abiding interest in Freemasonry. In heraldic language, the blazon of the shield is: Or, on a fess between in sinister chief a cross simple and in dexter base a bunch of grapes all azure, a mullet of the first.

Jung’s reading of the design was that the heavenly (Christian) and terrestrial or chthonic (Dionysian) spirits are united by the alchemist’s gold star, the aurum philosophorum. This interpretation is further supported by the fact that the actual bookplate was printed with three colour blocks, black for the image, with “opposites” of silver (represented in gray) for the Moon and the Feminine, and of gold (represented by pale yellow) for the Sun and the Masculine.

The motto on the bookplate is, of course, the one Jung chose for himself, which he had inscribed over the door to his home in Küsnacht. It translates as, “Bidden Or Not Bidden, God is Present.” He wrote in a letter of November 19, 1960, “It is a Delphic oracle … it says: yes, the god will be on the spot, but in what form and to what purpose?I have put the inscription there to remind my patients and myself: Timor dei initium sapientiæ ["The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."]. Here another not less important road begins, not the approach to ‘Christianity’ but to God himself and this seems to be the ultimate question.”

Bookplates, as indeed with printed books themselves, have been marginalized and largely forgotten. They are nonetheless personal, charming and candid expressions of the creative spirit and the soul, legacies and messages for the future holders of one’s library. Given Jung’s cheerful, meaningful and beautiful example of the genre, perhaps our members might feel encouraged to consider thus adorning their own book collections.

"There is no need to be ambitious, and, as Nietzsche says, ‘Go beyond yourself,’ for one has enough to do just being oneself. To go beyond oneself is tiring.”

C. G. Jung, December 2, 1935, recorded by Catharine Rush Cabot (Jane Cabot Reid, Jung, my mother, and I, page 110.)

 

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EDITORIAL: PROFESSIONALISM AND PERSONA

The international professional organization for Jungian analysts has met in congress and gone in this country, and those who participated in it found it to be exciting. It is an opportunity for significant learning and a high level of discussion, and a rare opportunity to feel – at least temporarily – part of a majority.

There are benefits to professionalism. It can create a kind of shorthand language, facilitating interaction with those who share norms and values.  It can create a kind of support-culture that upholds the deepest values and standards of that particular line of work. It can be a supportive reminder of what the profession exists to do.

But there is also a powerful element of Persona in most professionalism. Like individual personae, “professionalism” is often an idealized image that we’re presenting to each other and to the outer world. This can be good, when it’s loose and easy-fitting, but it can also be bad. We reckon that it’s bad – or at least, not good! – whenever it blocks or prevents genuine human encounter.

Robert Hopke says, in his book on this topic, that Persona exists to separate the sacred (interior) from the profane (outer world). In the end, Persona may best perform that crucial role when one is consciously aware of its existence and – this is perhaps the most important part – the fact that Persona is always balanced in the psyche by Shadow, those darker and unrecognized aspects of personality that we’d just as soon stayed hidden.

The thicker and more impenetrable the Persona, the likelier it is matched by some thick and impenetrable Shadow. This is why it is often valuable to review such good books on the topic as Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig’s Power in the Helping Professions to see and own this darker dimension of our professional life. (The chapter “Social Work as Inquisition” is particularly memorable!)

It is good to be conscious of the Persona component of professionalism, to work with it when appropriate and abandon it when not. Too much professionalism = too little humanity. When heart meets heart, there can be healing.

FOLLOW-UP TO “INTROVERSION AS PSYCHOPATHOLOGY”

Readers may remember, from the Summer 2010 issue of this newsletter, that Jungians worldwide have been reacting to media reports that introversion was going to be defined as one axis or aspect of psychopathology in an upcoming manual. We published in that issue the official I.A.A.P. letter of concern addressed to the “Personality Disorders Working Group,” part of the American Psychiatric Association’s project to create a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V.

Other Jungian organizations also entered into the fray, notably the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, to which very many Jungian analysts in North America belong. We will not reprint here the able composition of Dunbar Carpenter, the IRSJA president, but we do note with interest the terse response that he received by email from Dr. A.E. Skodol of the APA working group: “Thank you for your inquiry. We have changed the term ‘introversion’ to ‘detachment,’ in response to the website comments. We will no longer have a trait domain of introversion.”

Who is to say whether this gain for our position – reportedly the first time that a body outside the APA has influenced one of its key definitions – will appear in the final version. But we have to shake our heads that working group did not apparently think to use a thesaurus more thoughtfully as they made their substitution, bypassing for example such useful terms as disengagement, disaffiliation, disconnection, separation, or severance. The choice of “detachment” is as cherished by the Buddhists as “introversion” is for us. We shall be interested to see what the Dalai Lama has to say about their plan!

LIBRARY GEMS

Mary Lynn Kittelson, Sounding the Soul; The Art of Listening. Daimon, 1996.  Kittelson, a Jungian analyst at St. Paul, Minnesota, has written a deep and thoughtful book on how hearing matters to us. In the first part, she speaks of the science and mechanics of hearing, and we learn that the auditory channel is “set to go” well before birth. This is a hint at how close auditory energy is to psychic energy. Sound continues throughout life to be experienced as an energic flow. Then she explores the meaning of this data for us. Jungians and those influenced by us tend, she says, to put an over-heavy emphasis on visual attitudes and visual images. We are consequently in an aurally impoverished and dulled state – yet when we talk of something truly connecting with us, we speak of its “resonance,” and when we speak of insight from the Unconscious, we sometimes talk about “meaning beyond appearances.” Perhaps members would like to borrow this volume, and explore the persistent primacy of the ear. It's right here, she says, just around the corner from our noses.

Nancy J. Dougherty and Jacqueline J. West, The Matrix and Meaning of Character; An Archetypal and Developmental Approach. Routledge, 2007. Dougherty, a Jungian analyst practicing in Naples, Florida, and West, a Jungian analyst working in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have created an original and significant book that brings together the best insights of contemporary analysis. It is, in a phrase, about the beauty of character. The authors take nine personality structures (e.g., narcissism) and study their underlying archetypal depths, in so doing connecting – bridging – the technical language of psychopathology with clinical case work and the images, symbols and stories of the archetypal realm. This book, by creating a meeting-place for clinicians and scholars of all persuasions, has caused quite a stir in the field. It is not, however, beyond the reach of the ordinary educated reader. Its thesis that we transform through our personality structures, not in spite of them, is a welcome point. As James Hollis wrote in a recent review, “Too much psychotherapy emphasizes description, category, treatment plan, and ignores the dynamism of each human soul. (…) They remind us that psyche is a dynamic energy system, not a set of clinical categories.” This work seems destined to become a classic.

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Only if you are able to see the relativity, i.e., the uncertainty of all human postulates, can you experience that state in which analytical psychology makes sense.”

C.G. Jung, Letters, II, page 303f. (May 1956) .

 

SUBMISSIONS TO CHIRON

The C.G. Jung Foundation’s members and friends are very welcome to submit pieces for publication in Chiron. We would particularly welcome short articles (under 1000 words) on archetypal material, and very short (under 500 words) “book notes” and film reviews. Longer pieces can be negotiated, especially if serialization is possible.

We very sincerely promise that our responsibility to cast an eagle editorial eye over these submissions will be lightly and not impertinently applied, and that you will see beforehand any results of our meddling; so that the full essence of your insights and the character of your “voice” is kept safe and sound in the published version.

Hyperlinks in the electronic version of Chiron

Hyperlinks in the electronic version of Chiron do not imply or constitute endorsement of the organization or individual concerned, and are provided as a courtesy in current issues only. The C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario is not responsible for the content of such sites.

 

Past issues available online

 

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