Depth Psychology has long maintained a paradoxical position to creativity and to the creative individual. On one hand, the artist is singled out as the one “who creates the future,” while on the other, creativity is likened to an instinct shared by all. This six-week series will explore the paradoxes, perils, and reveries of creative “making,” what the Greeks called poesis, through the insights of Jungian and archetypal psychologies, as well as through mythology, philosophy, and artmaking itself. Whether you consider yourself an “artist,” a “craftsperson,” or simply long to answer a calling that will not subside, this course will both ground and transform your understanding of yourself as a member of an archetypal lineage of world-bridgers, shapeshifters, mystics, philosophers, healers, magicians, and alchemists. What unites these figures? What is their mission in our modern world? “The creative,” according to James Hillman, “is an achievement of love,” while for novelist Franz Kafka, “art, like prayer, is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace that will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.” What are your gifts? How do you bestow them? What are your achievements of love?
The six-week series features three primary areas of engagement:
1) curated weekly recorded lectures, readings, and links to auxiliary materials;
2) weekly live Saturday morning gatherings; plus
3) the opportunity to deepen and share the course content throughout the series via shared creative expression such as poetry, song, dance, film, performance, visual art, and discussion with fellow participants.
6 Saturdays: May 7, 14, 21, 28; June 4 and 11, 2022 (10:00-11:30am PT)