Summer Study Online Program 1: Longing for Eros: Love, Loss and Relationship

We begin this program with a consideration of an essential process of relationships, that is, dissolution and resolution, comparing it to transformation in the alchemical process. Our next session will delve into the crisis of emptiness in our current times and the longing for Eros which results. Mid-week we will explore the myth and history of Anteros, brother to Eros, and a clinical understanding of the experience of eros. In our fourth session, we will discuss the implications of tragic love. Our week concludes with an exploration of psychopathy and its relationship to the devaluing of the Feminine principle of Eros in professional work as well as in personal life.

Welcome and Orientation: Monday, July 10| 11:30 am – 12 noon

The Black and White of Relationships

This seminar will center on the dynamics of dissolution (the blackening) and resolution (the whitening) that is the essential process by which relationships (and individuation) grow and develop, and without which they atrophy. The analogous process can be seen in alchemy, which becomes a handy metaphor for individual and relational development.

Instructor: John Desteian, JD, LP

Love, Eros, and Emptiness in the 21st Century:
The Mandala Speaks

Tuesday, July 11

This presentation will revisit Jung’s declaration that there exists a widespread crisis of sterility in contemporary consciousness due to a culture of exaggerated skepticism and materialism. This emptiness fosters anxiety, despair, loss of meaning, and addiction.

Unearthed by trauma, this emptiness plunges us into a longing for Eros. The figure of Eros in classical mythology grants us images of this powerful, but complex and ambivalent encounter. Engaged, incarnated Eros in the forms of dream work, active imagination, creative expression, and active work on relationships can birth a transformation that “quickens the sterile wilderness of the soul as rain quickens the earth” (Jung). The ancient and worldwide experience of the mandala, a symbol of the Self, can emerge in these forms to contain and channel affect-images from the archetypal realm to grant a relationship with the living psyche.

Instructor: Don L. Troyer, MD

Wrestling with Eros: The Lost Myth of Anteros

Wednesday, July 12

The presentation will begin with a little-known Greek myth. According to this myth (alluded to by Cicero and Pausanias, and told by Themistius), Aphrodite is worried about the fact that her son Eros will not grow. She follows the advice of her sister Themis and conceives a second child, with Ares the god of war.

Eros’ brother Anteros becomes not so much the opposite of Eros as his paradoxical counterpart, the god who comes into play when the arrows of Eros are not properly acknowledged.

The lecture will range from the cult of Anteros, located at the base of the Acropolos in classical Athens where it vanished leaving few traces, through its reappearance in the Renaissance. Artists, writers and philosophers resurrected aspects of the myth of Anteros for a variety of purposes.

A Jungian argument will be introduced, with the notion of Anteros having been recuperated by the dominant Christian collective to represent Sacred Love opposing Eros as Profane Love. Paintings by il Sodoma and Caravaggio, as well as a philosophical argument by Nifo, will be presented as compensating for this political recuperation of the myth of Anteros, as creative attempts to restore the original tension evoked by the myth in its Greek setting. Having tracked manifestations of Anteros through the centuries, we can ask how would Anteros appear in modern dress and how might his presence contribute to our clinical understanding of the experiences of Eros today.

Instructor: Craig E. Stephenson, PhD, LP

Psychopathy and the Power of Eros

Thursday, July 13

Description TBA

Instructor: Julie Bondanza, PhD

Psychopathy and the Power of Eros

Friday, July 14

In Psychopathy Within I offer a new way of conceptualizing and defining psychopathy that represented a convergence of my divergent professional experiences as a forensic and clinical psychologist, a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist, and my own experiences as a Jungian student and analysand. A book review by Jungian analyst Thomas Elsner gets to the very heart of this Summer Study presentation, and so I share it with gratitude:

“Psychopathy Within is an expression of the Feminine principle of Eros. Guiding us through the labyrinths of the human heart in its experience of psychopathy, an experience described qualitatively by Dr. Eve Maram as a sense of something deep within that is missing and that exists in a dormant continuum with all of us, Dr. Maram draws on her experiences as a forensic psychologist, a Jungian therapist, and most centrally, a daughter to a father who suffered from psychopathy, to challenge the strict separation of "us" and "them" in diagnostic criteria and in relationship.

Beyond the yearnings to make logical sense of psychopathy, she eloquently expresses the ways in which Eros, or the Feminine Principle, is often missing or devalued in both professional work and in personal life. . . . By going consciously into dark experiences of psychopathy with love, appreciation for symbol, compassion, and a touch of humor, Dr. Maram shows us the gold, the possibility of authentic life, that lies hidden in what seems most unacceptable and most destructive to ourselves and others."

Instructor: Eve Maram, PsyD