“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” Carl Jung
JPEG 2026-2027 Course Content
10 Saturday Afternoon Sessions | £850 for the year | 17 October 2026 – 17 July 2027
JPEG group-work is an opportunity to explore, play and learn from Jungian and post-Jungian concepts in Analytical Psychology. This group meeting is not an analytic or group therapy forum but rather an experiential, process and discussion group that may have therapeutic elements and is facilitated by analyst members of the SAP.
In this JPEG seminar series, we will explore a series of European and non-European Fairy Tales and their interpretations from a Jungian perspective as well as contextualise them in terms of gender, power and culture. Many tales are about arrested development and its resumption, where the inner world is externalised in story form. We’ll consider how fairy tales emerge from specific cultural worlds and how those worlds shape the kinds of selves imagined within them. We’ll look closely at the assumptions these stories and ancient narratives make about the feminine, the masculine, and the fluid spaces between them—particularly around activity and passivity, agency and receptivity—and how these polarities generate and cast their corresponding shadows, how they resist, unsettle and shape each other.
“The unrealistic nature of these tales … makes it obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not
useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an
individual.” (Bettelheim 1976).
Fairy tales are seen as symbolic narrative of psychological development. We will draw on Jungian thinkers (Jung, Von Franz, Hillman and Kalsched etc) as well as relational psychoanalysis (Winnicott, Bowlby, Benjamin, Bromberg and Stern). The stories dramatize themes of attachment, trauma, identity, recognition, separation, moral development and transformation. We will also ask why is female maturation so often represented by waiting, endurance, or being recognised by a male and why is male development coded as action and transformation? We will also explore the tension between identity as process (fluid) rather than destination (fixed) and how culture promotes and constrains this process. Do fairy tales police gender or do they accidentally undo it? We will be drawing on thinkers such as Angela Carter, Marina Warner and Judith Butler and others. We will draw on specific tales and readings of these tales and illustrate some themes through music, dance and film.
Programme Structure
The JPEG programme will take place on 10 Saturdays over 10 months from 2pm-5pm. Participants will be asked to complete some reading, view some artwork, or watch an excerpt from a film relating to the seminar beforehand. The day will be structured roughly in the following way.
2-3.00 Social Dreaming Matrix
3-3.30 Break
3.30 Dream Reflections
4.00 Small Group discussion/exercise
4.30 Large Group reflection/exercise
5.00 Close
General information
Venue: In person at the SAP 1 Daleham Gardens, London NW3 5BY
Date: Once monthly on a Saturday, 10 meetings per year
Time: 14.00 – 17.00
Fee: £850 for the one year programme
Booking: Gita Khalatbari on 020 7435 7696 or publicevents@thesap.org.uk
Dates:
17th October | Enclosed and Disguised: abandonment, resilience, and the emergent Self | Hansel & Gretel (Germany) Mulan (China)
21st November | Frozen Silence, Speaking Life: Unravelling the Wounded Self Sleeping Beauty (West Europe) Scheherazade: from One Thousand and One Nights) (Middle East/ Persian-Arabic)
19th December | Hidden and Exiled: The limits of recognition and belonging | Rapunzel (Germany) Princess Kaguya (Japan) Legend of the Pale Mountains (Italy)
16th January | Facing numinous desire: illusion, knowledge and Individuation | The sirens- in Odyssey by Homer (Greece) Divine Comedy by Dante (Italy): Canto 5
20th February | Forbidden Rooms and Animal Hearts: Desire, Terror and Becoming | Bluebeard (France) The Bloody Chamber (UK) The Lady Who Lives on the Moon (China)
20th March | The Codger divided: Envy and Wisdom in the ageing feminine and masculine | Snow White (Germany) Baba Yaga (East Europe)
17th April | What Lies Beneath: The Fate of the Unseen Self | The Ugly Duckling (Denmark) The Snake Prince (India)
15th May | From Mischief to Meaning: How the Self learns to Live’ | Pinocchio (Italy) The Monkey King (China)
19th June | When the Unwanted Speaks: Desire, Fear and the limits of being Heard’ | The Frog King (Germany) The Talking Skull (Africa)
17th July | The Beast and the Bird; On Loving Without Possessing | Beauty and the Beast (France)/ The Crane Wife (Japan)
