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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. 4 Summer 2011

Editor: Robert Black

Click for PDF version of this issue for easier printing

 

Contents

Winner of The Red Book

Respondents to the survey who wished to have a chance to win a copy of The Red Book had their names entered into a random draw programme by the survey company. We are pleased to announce that Mr. Peter Bodi of Toronto is the winner of the draw. Congratulations! He can arrange to pick up his copy of this fascinating book by calling the Jung Foundation administrator, Catherine Johnson, at 416-961-9767.

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Upcoming Film on Freud, Jung and Spielrein

At the time of publication, we did not yet have a release date for a new film on C.G. Jung that is bound to raise interest and perhaps hackles.

“A Dangerous Method,” directed by Toronto resident David Cronenberg, is adapted from a screenplay written by Christopher Hampton from his 2002 stage play, “The Talking Cure.” This latter is grounded in the 1993 book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method.

Kerr, it should be known, depended on the analysis of historian and psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg, whose judgment was that Jung and Spielrein had a sexual relationship in breach of Jung’s professional ethics. It was this, he felt, that explained Jung’s departure from the mental hospital where he worked and the university where he lectured, and that affected a change in Jung’s relationship with Freud after Spielrein went to Vienna in 1912 to work with him.

Whatever the truth of Jung’s possible sexual involvement with her, they had a deep and emotional collaboration that greatly affected them both. Intimacy suggests depth, and depth suggests explicit rootedness in the Unconscious. It seems likely – and this would seem to be the honest point of the books, play and film – that it was precisely in this alchemy that we might locate what cured her of her illness.

We haven’t seen the film, whose release date at press was not certain, although we plan to do so. Several of us analysts have thought we might organize an evening for members who want to discuss it. If this happens, no doubt it will centre on how strange, unique, convoluted and tricky Unconscious healing processes can be. As indeed Jung said, many times, both parties to an analysis will be changed by it, if truly they connect in the Depths.

Jung is not unsympathetic with our desire to know more about how he decided and acted in accordance with what he was discovering, but a true understanding of this relationship might be beyond us. Everything about the man seems much more complex than any writings about him trying to understand. In a letter of July 13, 1954, he wrote how "the life of an individual … suddenly becomes visible somewhere but rests on definite though invisible foundations, so has no proper beginning and no proper end, ceasing just as suddenly and leaving questions behind which should have been answered." This of course leads to “unverifiable speculation” and makes it almost impossible “to establish facts.”

A bit later that same year, on November 17, 1954, Jung did write ruefully of his general tendency to dive into a situation before processing it, "I can assure you I am a moral coward as long as possible. As a good little bourgeois citizen, I am lying low and concealed as deeply as possible, still shocked by the amount of the indiscretions I have committed, swearing to myself that there would be no more of it because I want peace and friendly neighbourhood and a good conscience and the sleep of the just. Why should I be the unspeakable fool to jump into the cauldron?"

In the end of course, we shall see what Mr. Cronenberg presents to us, and hope for the best. Perhaps anything profound and worthwhile that might get people to turn to Jung would be a good thing. But for us already drawn to his opus, of course, the proof of Jung’s pudding is in the eating. We follow this approach not because of Jung the man, but because his approach works – it gives insight, it heals, and it guides.

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Survey Feedback Will Help Shape Changes to the Public Programme

We have already thanked you, but let us say it once again: Thanks! The response to our recent online survey exceeded expectations. Not only did we hear back from many of you, your feedback was thorough, well-considered, and will help us greatly as we make changes to shape the future of our C. G. Jung Foundation of Ontario.

For your interest we include, via the link below, the report of the survey findings as was presented to the Board in June. We will now provide you with some further observations, but please feel free to explore the report in detail at your leisure.

View Survey of Members & Public Summary Report (in PDF format or PowerPoint format)

One other introductory note may be in order, which pertains to the image on the title page of the report. The image is from a picture taken of one side of Jung’s famous Bollingen stone which was reputed to be used as a foundation stone by the quarry but was the wrong size. Jung kept it as his ‘orphan’ stone and carved its faces. The side here is a circle in the centre of which is a small character known as Telesphoros. The translated inscription reads:

"Time is a child – playing like a child – playing a board game – the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams."
Telesphoros, known as “he who brings completeness,” was also associated with wisdom since although his arms are often concealed beneath a thick cloak, underneath he holds hold attributes such as scrolls or a tablet often symbols for wisdom. We felt Telesphoros was a fitting emblem from our survey findings, which we hope will help us lead the way to more wisdom and completeness for the Foundation’s future endeavours.

Good representation from members and other participants

We received 165 total responses, broken out as follows:
Members:                         50
Lapsed Members:          63
Participants:                     29
Interested:                        23

This was a solid overall sample and provided very good and roughly proportional representation of the four groups of which we’ve been long aware . (“Participants” are active event attendees who have never been members, and “Interested” visit our web site recurrently but who haven’t made it out to an event.)

Important feedback … important new changes

As you may (or may not!) know, OAJA analysts donate their time to the Foundation for lectures and seminars. Therefore, membership fees are solely applied to help offset operating costs. Fee levels and event pricing have in the past been set to what was seen as a reasonable contribution from members both for the quality of the presentation and also helping us all to continue promoting the works and ideas of C. G. Jung. 

However, times change, and the way we conceive of membership has to change as well.  We need to reach out to a broader audience and keep in mind that as never before there is significant competition for how people can choose spend their time and ‘cultural dollars.’

We’ve heard your message that membership fees need to be affordable for all. For some, the annual fees were simply unaffordable and for others, the event discounts were not enough to justify the annual fee payment. We are still finalizing details, but for the 2011-2012 Public Programme your input will bring in some attractive new pricing both for membership fees and for events. Perhaps larger numbers of members, paying a lower annual fee, will offset any foreseeable decline in income. As well, we are going to do more to ensure the value of membership in the Foundation. We hope that lower fees and recognizable value will go some way to bolstering our membership numbers.

We also learned that most of you would pay online, especially if there was a payment incentive, so by the Autumn we hope to have implemented an online payment capability to our web site. As well as bringing us up to speed technologically, this will be very helpful to our marketing efforts to capture interest right at the time of event announcement and as well for planning purposes.

We received very valuable feedback on your topics of interest which included dreams, applying Jung's ideas to current day topics, myths, fairy tales, alchemy and the Red Book, to mention some of the top picks. This information confirmed many of our suspicions and endorsed our some of our recent initiatives such as the popular “Jungian Views on Burning Issues” which will see its third installment in the forthcoming season.

Involvement of members

Another key piece of information was the importance of, but generally low satisfaction with, the Foundation’s involvement of its members. This feedback likely goes hand in hand with 32% of you who would like to provide volunteer services to the Foundation. From your survey responses we know that that there is a very wide range of skills and interest, so our challenge will be to see how we can best capture this interest and use it effectively. This is not always a straightforward task given varying levels of commitment. However, we are pursuing several ideas that hopefully will move us closer to fostering more engagement with our members.

There is much more that could be said about your valuable ideas, but we will now bring our observations to a close. We encourage you to have a close look at the final report … and stay tuned for exciting announcements about the new 2011-2012 season and the interesting changes that are coming your way.

PPMC

Tim Pilgrim, Robert Black, Jean Connon Unda, Caroline Duetz

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It seems that individuation is a ruthlessly important task to which everything else should take second place.

C.G. Jung, Letters, II, 4 January 1958

 

A Wonderful Book from Taschen

Have you see the new Taschen Book of Symbols? It is a beautiful, new, thick and very well presented volume produced by the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). As Joseph Henderson wrote for the ARAS website, “The main function of the archive is to enable people of all kinds, and not solely specialists, to discover the living quality of ancient myths, rituals, and symbolic artifacts, and in so doing to deepen their awareness of the archetypes of the collective unconscious that underlie all cultural forms.”

This book is stuffed with extraordinarily beautiful images, and the elegantly-written prose texts that accompany them assist wonderfully to “open up” each symbol. It is not a dictionary – it is organized around five general themes – but is insightful and worthwhile, a genuinely new contribution to the field. It is true to its full name, The Book of Symbols; Reflections on Archetypal Symbolism.

ARAS started as a collection of archetypal images by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn at her estate on Lake Maggiore in southern Switzerland, where beginning in August 1933, she conducted meetings of the Eranos Society, an early Jungian discussion group. After World War II, copies of the archive were distributed throughout the Jungian world, and have been used extensively.

The modern extent of the ARAS collection – 17,000 described images – is due largely to Jessie Fraser, librarian of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, with financial assistance from APCNY member Jane Abbot Pratt. The collection was expanded far beyond its original parameters. It  recently went on line, although it is open only through a rather hefty annual subscription.

This volume currently retails for $49.95 and is available in most bookstores. Its ISBN number is 978-3-8365-1448-4.

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“C.G. Jung: Fifty Years On” a pleasant social event

JungA couple of dozen people gathered on Sunday, June 12, to remember C.G. Jung on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. After refreshments organized by analyst Caroline Duety and former administrator Edith Leslie, amidst glorious flowers anonymously donated, a short “liturgy” was held. Created by Robert Black from the English translation of Jung’s funeral service, and from the booklet produced after a great gathering in December 1961 at New York City to mark Jung’s passing, passages were read by OAJA president Roger LaRade and analysts Margaret Meredith and Jean Connon Unda.    

The group then watched a new DVD from Spring Publications, “Where We Are: Jungian Analysts in the 21st Century.” Discussion followed. Members who were not present at the event who wish to borrow the DVD can look in the public DVD collection. We’d encourage them also to borrow a few of the “Remembering Jung” series produced by the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles.

A Challenge to Analysis?

Your editor has dithered for months about sharing news of a new book’s arrival in the Boa Library collection, Marion Rauscher Gallbach’s Learning From Dreams. A graduate of Zurich and practicing analyst in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Gallbach has created something different, an innovation that challenges traditional notions of analysis and in some regards goes well beyond the several “post Jung” schools.

Marion Gallbach is the coordinator of the Dream Center of the Clinic of the Brazilian Society for Analytical Psychology (SBrPA). The present book comes out of that experience, and particularly from her research within what are called Dream-Experience-Groups. As one might expect, group work is not the traditional individual work with which most of us are familiar. Gallbach talks of “Dream Processing” within the tradition of C.G. Jung, but in groups where dreamers are taught how to work with their own dreams; and of a “Body-Active Imagination” process drawn from Jung, psychosomatic studies, and other body approaches, where the fundamental unity of psyche and soma is developed to help people to connect with the Unconscious. 

Most of us in the Jungian world are familiar with the concept of therapeutic group work, and that we do relatively little of that, if any. The individual, in Jung’s view, is everything. New notions first emerge into the world through the individual. This book says that such a position is no longer acceptable because it is too costly, and in sum, “the traditional therapeutic model of prolonged individual analysis is no longer appropriate for our times.” So how can we “work most effectively and practically with dreams in the modern world”? Her answer would seem to be, collectively.

She is particularly keen that these approaches be taken out of the clinic and into schools, and that the Unconscious be given a ready place in society at large. Much of it resonates with Jung, especially at those few points where he muses on the social or political ramifications of his ideas, but some of it is new. We found especially interesting her ideas on a process of symbolic elaboration of psychosomatic symptoms that favor their transformation and resolution.

So in the end, our dithering was silenced by the knowledge that Jung’s ideas are having an effect in countless new ways of which one might not immediately approve. There are a host of ideas here. Make up your own mind about them. This is not your usual Jungian self-help book. It goes far beyond Robert A. Johnson’s Inner Work, for example, but it holds worthwhile insights and surprises for those who are not faint of heart.

This book was published by Daimon Verlag, and its ISBN number is 3-85630-703-6.

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As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, preface.

 

Also New in the Fraser Boa Library

Fire in the Stone: The Alchemy of Desire [collection of essays], by Stanton Marlan. ISBN: 1-882670-49-3  
Kabbalistic Visions: C.G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism, by Sanford L. Drob. ISBN: 978-1-882670-86-4  
Portrait of the Blue Lady: The Character of Melancholy, by Lyn Cowan. ISBN: 978-1-882670-96-3  
Psyche and the Sacred: Spirituality Beyond Religion, by Lionel Corbett (Foreword by Murray Stein).ISBN: 1-882670-34-5 

More titles are expected, particularly a new, eagerly-awaited, posthumous work What Is Death? on their process of dying by Marie-Louise von Franz, Liliane Frey-Rohn, and Aniela Jaffé.  The German version, published by Daimon Verlag, has just appeared and the English translation is currently being produced.

Public Education Programme brochure 2011-2012 In Production

Implications of the Survey discussed elsewhere in this issue have delayed production of next year’s programme for the public. It is expected to appear around the beginning of August and, of course, to be posted electronically on this website. Any changes that may prove necessary, as the year unfolds, will be posted on the website as soon as they can be.

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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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