Friday, September 13, 2024, 6:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.
1992: starting point of the ecopsychological revolution
This seminar aims to emphasize that personal transformation is a necessary condition for the transformation of the world, and vice versa: to dare to take the paths of personal fulfillment, spiritual realization and creativity, it is necessary to transform the world. The relationship is dialectical and not one-way. The world we are talking about is not only social reality; it includes our environments, nature and the cosmos. Far from opposing each other, the psyche, the world and living nature interact with each other. This double transformation is necessary because our natural habitat and the human being are swept away by a destructive current: nature is reduced to a reservoir of “resources”; the human is reduced to homo economicus. It is the time of the disenchantment of the world, of its depoeticization. Our main idea is that the abandonment of the principle of the Soul of the world is at the origin of this socio-psychological rupture between the world, living Nature and the soul. Ecopsychology, which took off with Theodore Roszak’s The Voice of the Earth, aims to rehabilitate this forgotten universal Soul.
Saturday, September 14, 2024, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
The Countercultural Insurrection of American Youth in the 1960s’
The “years of hope and days of rage,” as one student leader put it, refers to the period in American social history that began in the 1950s and ended in the mid-1970s. This era was marked by the emergence of a conscious youth, the poets of the beat generation, and a “counterculture” that broke with the norms of the dominant society. The 1960s were one of the birthplaces of ecopsychology. From Joan Baez to Martin Luther King, from the Woodstock music festival to the pacifist marches against the Vietnam War, from Jack Kerouac to the utopia of Flower Power, from the dialogue between the cultures of the East and the West to transpersonal psychology, from the struggles for civil rights and against racism to those of indigenous peoples, we are at the heart of an exciting adventure that, perhaps, has not yet said its last word, despite the mistakes and the political cycle of the American hard right, from Reagan to Trump. Theodore Roszak, who initiated ecopsychology, was a pillar of the counterculture. He will be one of our guides in this exploration. This historical period, rich in social and cultural transformations, continues to influence our present and offers paths for the future. It reminds us that, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges, change is possible.