Jung was prescient in seeing the ominous consequences of psychological and spiritual poverty of late modernity, those soul destroying consequences we are living at this critical moment. Every epoch has its dominant myth, the narrative that defines identity and priorities for a good life; in effect that myth casts a spell that creates the reality we live. In his recent prophetic book Paul Kingsnorth calls our myth, this spell of late modernity, “the machine”: unfeeling, relentless, de-humanizing.
Can psychoanalysis and analytic psychology wake us up, break this spell, and help rescue our diminishing humanity from the ashes of this cultural wasteland? Perhaps.
In this workshop, we will look at how two complimentary approaches to making meaning and expanding consciousness that just might help save us from ourselves, two approaches that in very different ways ultimately leading to individuation. In recent decades contemporary psychoanalysis has made an ontological turn, shifting its focus to how meaning is created from the raw material of experience, a process named mentalization. Jung appropriated the metaphors of alchemy to describe the subtle processes of psychic wholeness, growth of consciousness, and deep relationality. With the development of mentalization and alchemical imagination, we can perhaps find a way forward.
