Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious is usually read as the birth of a new psychology, but Satya Doyle Byock dares to read it differently. In a new IAJS seminar on October 17, she argues that the Red Book also records Jung’s psychological collapse within what she calls the “soulless social structure of white supremacist patriarchy,” and the unconscious’s remarkable capacity to cure him of it. In this lecture, she will focus on a handful of the Red Book’s key figures, Salome and Elijah, Baucis and Philemon, tracing how Jung’s relationship to each developed as he moved deeper into the unconscious and, in Byock’s reading, came to face, listen to, and eventually love the dark feminine he encountered there. She also draws on newly released interviews compiled in Jung’s Life & Work to push further than Jung himself was able to in his own time, in an attempt to pull the feminine out of the shadows. Not for women’s sake this time, but for men’s.
Byock is a practicing psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in Portland, Oregon, and directs the Salome Institute of Jungian Studies’ year-round programme in Jungian psychology and myth. She is the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House in the US, Penguin Press in the UK, and also translated into French, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese), and her work has appeared on NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, and numerous podcasts including 10% Happier, Pulling the Thread, and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. She also co-hosted a now-completed podcast on Jung’s Red Book.
For a sense of Byock’s thinking ahead of the seminar, she recently spoke with Katherine Bell on The Dream Journal (Experiential Dreamwork) about quarterlife as its own developmental stage, the tension between what she calls “stability types” and “meaning types,” and the Red Book as a map of psychological crisis and transformation, alongside dreams, nightmares, and active imagination more broadly. You can watch the full episode here.
Readers can follow Byock’s writing and join her monthly gatherings through her Substack newsletter, Self & Society, and join the waitlist for the Salome Institute’s year-round programme at salomeinstitute.com.
The seminar is moderated by Gustavo Beck and runs 1.5 hours via Zoom, beginning at 9am Los Angeles, noon New York, and 5pm London. You can register to attend here.