“I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her. I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. [….] Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.”
-C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition, Philemon Series (NY: Norton & Co., 2009), p.128 [2]
Since 2006 our annual conference and retreat has opened ISAPZURICH’s post-graduate program to all with interest in C.G. Jung and Analytical Psychology. “The earth has a spirit of her own,” Jung mused, and elsewhere he called it the genius loci, the spirit of the place. It is this, the particular genius loci, that infuses each Odyssey as it leads us to a different place in Switzerland each year and inspires each Odyssey’s topic. So, too, this spirit imbues our presenters’ analytic views on contemporary research in a variety of fields, and as well, their handling of traditional areas of Jungian interest— fairytale, dream, myth, art, religion, personal and collective experience, clinical practice.
This historical and beloved locus re-inspires our reflections on the realms of soul. In today’s life—riddled with so many kinds of anxiety—we seem to experience an acute splitting of two archetypally coupled realities: the outer objective world and the interior world of soul. We seem to suffer collectively from alienation of soul and even soul murder. With soul in exile, do we risk losing touch with an inner immortal part of ourselves? Might a re-summoning of soul provide an antidote to anxiety?
Our search for this “untethered” part needs to begin with our (re-)attunement to soul’s secret dwelling places, i.e. places that resonate with poetry, beauty, remoteness, ambiguity, brokenness, pain, paradox, mystery. Some apt starting points can be found in nature and in the imagery of fairy tale, myth, dream, literature, dance, music, and other arts. What can we learn from alchemy and metaphysics about the soul’s autonomy? What other stones might we turn?
A unique feature of the Odyssey 2022 is our offer of one day of full-day courses that afford intense and creative immersion in your choice of work with the body, dreams, fairy tales, calligraphy, or hiking (weather permitting).
